NOVEL APPROACHES FOR PLANT HEALTH MONITORING
ABSTRACT
Agriculture must adjust to future climate change already pushing growers to constantly try to monitor plants’ health to offset yield losses. To reduce yield losses and facilitate effective management practices constant and precise monitoring of plant health is essential. Current monitoring approaches fall short in fulfilling early detection of physiological perturbations that could threaten productivity and make corrective interventions possible. In PANTHEON, our major goal is to establish approaches with unprecedented precision and sensitivity for constant monitoring of plant health focusing on Brassicaceae and Grapevine. These are important annual and perennial species, respectively, for the EU economy and among the most valuable crops in the world. We will develop remote sensing coupled with spectroscopy-based approaches allowing high spatialization of results during abiotic stress and pest diseases. We will complement these approaches with remote or lab microtechnologies, imaging sensing for label-free, fast and sensitive analysis focusing on early stress perception. In parallel, we will establish computational approaches to manage monitoring data and provide software for monitoring the plant’s health and yields. PANTHEON comprises nine partners, five academic and four non-academic partners. Academic institutions, nurseries, breeders, software developers, and other private sectors will be the main recipients of the novel knowledge and technical advances obtained. The approaches that will be developed can be adapted for monitoring the health of any important plant species, apart from Brassicaceae and Grapevine. Finally, PANTHEON is endowed with significant training activities for the training of the next generation of researchers to meet the growing demands of Academic and Industry settings.