Unmanned Aerial System (UAS)-Based Plant Stand Monitoring for FOV4 Resistance Evaluation

New diseases often threaten the sustainability of crop production. When they first appear, plant breeders are on the front line and need to screen thousands of genotypes to find genetic resistance. Thanks to advancements in sensors and robotics, Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) can now be used to capture precise phenotypic information in a high throughput mode. In 2017, a devastating cotton disease, Fusarium Wilt Race 4 (FOV4), was confirmed in far West Texas (El Paso and Hudspeth counties). Ever since the first appearance, cotton breeders in public and private sectors have come together to screen genotypes for resistance to this disease. In 2020, we collected ultra-fine spatial resolution UAS data on June 1^st and June 30^th. We will present a workflow to process the UAS data to calculate plant stand and related phenotypic information so that breeders can use the information for disease mortality/screening purposes. The proposed workflow is expected to assist breeders in handling the large volume of genotypes more effectively and addressing the subjectivity of the evaluations from multiple experiments.