Centre De Cooperation Internationale en Recherche Agronomique Pour le Developpement - C.I.R.A.D. Epic
CIRAD (French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development) is a public industrial and commercial enterprise (EPIC) under the joint authority of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its staff is over 1600 with 800 researchers. CIRAD works with the whole range of developing countries to generate and pass on new knowledge, support agricultural development and fuel the debate on the main global issues concerning agriculture. CIRAD's activities involve the life sciences, social sciences and engineering sciences, applied to agriculture, food and rural territories. CIRAD works on: food security, ecological intensification, emerging diseases, the future of agriculture in developing countries, etc.
Main task in the project
In relation to this project, the PhenoMEN team of the AGAP Institute (https://umr‐agap.cirad.fr) of CIRAD develops methods and software components for managing and analysing plant phenotyping data. The Phenomenal team carries out work to answer the following scientific challenges:
- The acquisition of spatio-temporal data using various sensors (microscopes, 2D and 3D scanners and cameras) and the massive computation for analysing these sensor data (mostly in the form of 2D or 3D images);
- The management and the standardization of these heterogeneous data in order to share, re-use and publish them;
- The design of new generations of functional-structural plant models and crop models in order to compute integrated traits that are not directly observable in the raw data. In collaboration with the partners INRAE and Invenio, CIRAD will participate in WP3 to the plant architectural phenotyping activities. In particular, Cirad will design a shoot-root model of strawberry, built from phenotyping data, visualise strawberry spatio-temporal development, and characterize and compare the yield of different cultivars based on plant architectural data.