A breeder in the sky: scoring flowering with fewer flights
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: ABSTRACT Flowering time is a trait of broad interest and importance to both plant breeders and plant biologists. Unlike many other traits, flowering time cannot be scored accurately from a single observation; its measurement requires repeated observations of the same experiments over time. Both classification- and object-detection-based approaches have demonstrated the potential to estimate flowering time from Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery rather than by manual observation, but they still require data collection at many time points. Here, we train and deploy a regression-based framework for scoring flowering time. Using a dataset of more than 200,000 UAV images and associated flowering-time records collected across 27 environments, we demonstrate that this approach enables the prediction of flowering time from as few as one observation per field experiment and successfully generalizes to field experiments in environments not represented in the training dataset. These results indicate that regression-based approaches for predicting flowering time from sparse UAV observations have the potential to substantially reduce the data-collection burden in field experiments.
Authors: Zhongjie Ji, Aaron J. DeSalvio, Alper Adak, Mustafa A. Arik, David Ertl, Shawn M. Kaeppler, Jode Edwards, Sherry Flint-Garcia, Candice N. Hirsch, Addie M. Thompson, Jacob D. Washburn, Natalia de Leon, Bijesh Maharjan, Dipak Santra, Pascal Izere, Biquan Zhao, Yeyin Shi, Seth C. Murray, Yufeng Ge, James C. Schnable
Language: English
Topic: Smart Agriculture and AI
Subfield: Plant Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214043004