Preparing for climate change with sensor technology

Watching potatoes grow – without digging them up 

When Dr. Gerth began X-raying potatoes ten years ago, he was one of the pioneers in the virtually unexplored field of nondestructive phenotyping of underground plant parts. Back then, he was studying potatoes suffering from heat stress. He wanted to track their growth without digging them up, so he cultivated the potatoes in flowerpots and constructed a computed tomography device with his team to X-ray the plants. “Regular X-rays allowed us to observe exactly how tuber formation is affected by heat and drought,” Gerth says. 

With this research, he laid the foundation for the construction of a special X-ray chamber for crops; this one-of-a-kind equipment exists only at Fraunhofer EZRT in Fürth. Pots of crops are arranged in neat rows on the narrow conveyor belt in front of the X-ray machine. The assembly line positions the plants one after the other in the device. After just five minutes, it’s the next plant’s turn. “With this system, we can even record the delicate root architecture of wheat and observe how the plants react to heat or drought stress,” Gerth explains. “Our device is the most modern and powerful X-ray system for underground plant parts.” 

In collaboration with Fraunhofer EZRT, Dutch company Pheno-Key has developed a robust CT scanner for plant cultivation. Its customers also include big seed breeding companies, which have tens of thousands of plants in their greenhouses that need to be assessed. The CT images have enormously high resolution and measure some 40 gigabytes. To make these data volumes manageable for customers, algorithms analyze the data sets automatically and zero in on the important data.