Maize crops grown during the summer rainy season in the tropics occasionally face extreme weather conditions that limit crop establishment and yield potential. Among various abiotic stresses, contingent/intermittent soil waterlogging is one of the important constraints for maize production in the Asian tropics and many other maize growing areas around the world.
Monitoring soil moisture is critical to understand genotypic performance in yield trials and is then an important factor for data quality.
This tool provides information on theory, protocol, troubleshooting, and equipment needed to undertake a rigorous soil moisture monitoring in your breeding plots.
Detailed assessment and planning is required for breeding programs to continuously improve phenotyping operations. These templates have been created to assess and act on potential improvements in the following areas, each of which are further divided into sub-categories:
Phenotyping tools and services
Gustavo Teixeira
As breeding operations and phenotyping lead, Gustavo provides expert evaluation of breeding program operations according to continuous improvement and operational excellence methodologies and leads initiatives to improve CGIAR and NARS operations capacities. An expert in agriculture engineering, processes, mechanization and automization, Gustavo has over 15 years’ experience in the private sector including as Automation Manager for R&D in Latin America at Syngenta. Gustavo has an MBA in industrial Management and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).
As of 2022, this work is delivered primarily through CGIAR Initiative on Breeding Resources, Work Packages 3 and 5.
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New mechanization, automation, precision and high-throughput phenotyping tools have the potential to lower the cost of assessing variety traits and genotype-environment-management interactions, while improving accuracy and precision.
The operations and phenotyping module supports Platform members to adopt these new tools to increase the quantity and quality of phenotypic data they produce, and to use this data to improve the effectiveness of their breeding programs.
As a community of practice, the module creates information about tools, guides and best practices to be shared through the platform Toolbox. Expert interdisciplinary advice is shared to enable more rapid and effective adoption of phenotyping tools.
Finally, the module supports users to upgrade and share their phenotyping infrastructure, acts as a broker for approved services, and interfaces with the Bioinformatics module to support the management and use of phenotypic data.