The Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) was established in 2016 based upon $37M CDN of federal government funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund awarded to the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The seven-year initiative is based on the USask campus in Saskatoon and managed by the Global Institute for Food Security. A founding principle of the P2IRC was to establish multi-disciplinary research programs involving researchers at variety of USask faculties, including the Departments of Plant Science, Crop Development Centre, Soil Science, Engineering, Computer Science and Social Sciences, together with researchers at Canada’s only synchrotron (Canadian Light Source) and federal researchers at Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada and the National Research Council.

The intent of the research programs was to utilize the various expertise on campus to establish high throughput phenotyping platforms in multiple crops with the inclusion of new imaging technologies and significant computational support. Research in the P2IRC was broken down into four major themes for the first three years of the initiative to build a foundational set of platforms. These were: Theme 1 Phenometrics; Theme 2: Image Acquisition technologies; Theme 3: Computational Informatics of Crop Phenotype Data; and Theme 4: Societal and Developing World Impact. A description of the key components of the themes together with details on a how these Themes have supported the development of a high throughput digital phenotyping platform in wheat will be described. The transition of the themes into a series of outcome orientated flagship projects that will focus on the development of crops with resiliency to a changing climate, will also be described. More details about the P2IRC can be found here: https://p2irc.usask.ca.

THEME 6