Field Phenotyping for the Future

Global agricultural production has to double by 2050 to meet the demands of an increasing population and the challenges of a changing climate. Plant phenomics (the characterisation of the full set of phenotypes of a given species) has been proposed as a solution to relieve the ‘phenotyping bottleneck’ between functional genomics and plant breeding studies. In this article, we survey current approaches and describe recent technological and methodological advances for phenotyping under field conditions and discuss the prospects for these emerging technologies in addressing the challenges of future plant research.