Measuring plants from the sky?
A look back at summer 2025 and the collaboration with the sunflower research team Syngenta France.
Multi-criteria phenotyping using drones was carried out on sunflower nurseries.
One of the most basic characteristics to measure manually, but also one of the most tedious, is the average height of each row. This is especially true when it comes to the numerous rows in a nursery, with plots of only one row and six meters in length!
The powerful tools of the Solvi platform made it easy to study the influence of multiple parameters on measurement accuracy:
- flight altitude
- clear or overcast sky
- visible or multispectral cameras
- plant height statistics (average, minimum, maximum, percentiles)
- height reference systems (bare ground around the plot or Canopy Height Model)
With the most favorable combination of these parameters and for 825 plots, we obtained a high correlation with manual plot measurements, i.e., R2=0.779 (see graph).
According to the team, this is sufficient accuracy for selection and a credible alternative to manual measurement.