This technology makes data collection on leaf angles significantly more efficient than conventional techniques, providing plant breeders with useful data more quickly.

“The angle of a plant’s leaves, relative to its stem, is important because the leaf angle affects how efficient the plant is at performing photosynthesis,” says Lirong Xiang, first author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of biological and agricultural engineering at NC State.

“For example, in corn, you want leaves at the top that are relatively vertical, but leaves further down the stalk that are more horizontal. This allows the plant to harvest more sunlight. Researchers who focus on plant breeding monitor this sort of plant architecture because it informs their work.

“However, conventional methods for measuring leaf angles involve measuring leaves by hand with a protractor, which is both time-consuming and labour-intensive,” Xiang says. “We wanted to find a way to automate this process and we did.”

The new technology, called AngleNet, has two key components: the hardware and the software.

The hardware is a robotic device mounted on wheels. It is steered manually, and is narrow enough to navigate between crop rows that are spaced 30 inches apart – the standard width used by farmers.

The device itself consists of four tiers of cameras, each of which is set to a different height to capture a different level of leaves on the surrounding plants. Each tier includes two cameras, allowing it to capture a stereoscopic view of the leaves and enable 3D modeling of plants.

As the device is steered down a row, it is programmed to capture multiple stereoscopic images, at multiple heights, of every plant it passes.

All this visual data is fed into a software program that computes the leaf angle for the leaves of each plant at different heights.

“For plant breeders, it’s important to know not only what the leaf angle is, but how far those leaves are above the ground,” Xiang says. “This gives them the information they need to assess the leaf angle distribution for each row of plants. This, in turn, can help them identify genetic lines that have desirable traits or undesirable traits.”

To test the accuracy of AngleNet, researchers compared leaf angle measurements done by the robot in a corn field to leaf angle measurements made by hand using conventional techniques.

“We found that the angles measured by AngleNet were within five degrees of the angles measured by hand, which is well within the accepted margin of error for purposes of plant breeding,” Xiang says.

“We’re already working with some crop scientists to make use of this technology, and we’re optimistic that more researchers will be interested in adopting the technology to inform their work. Ultimately, our goal is to help expedite plant breeding research that will improve crop yield.”

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“Even though soybeans are not thought of as being dependent on pollinators, we found that soybean plants are still attractive to bees,” says Hannah Levenson, a postdoctoral research scholar at North Carolina State and corresponding author of a paper on the work. 

She says unlike crops such as blueberries or strawberries that are considered to be pollinator dependent, little work has been done on crops that aren’t considered pollinator dependent. 

“We wanted to know how having pollinator habitat near soybean fields would affect both bee species and crop yields for the soybeans.”

For the study, researchers worked at eight research stations across North Carolina. At each station, they evaluated two soybean fields. One was adjacent to an established area of pollinator habitat, and one was as far away as possible – generally just under one kilometre away.

The pollinator habitat was created by planting wildflower seed mixes in unused land near fields. The habitat could be grown in areas that aren’t amenable to crop cultivation, or on land that can be used to grow crops but had not been cultivated that season due to crop rotation or other factors.

To assess impact on bees, the researchers did two things. First, they surveyed bee communities in both soybean fields and the pollinator habitat at each research station. The surveys consisted of a detailed visual assessment to establish the overall abundance of bees, as well as which species were present at each location. 

The research team also collected pollen samples from three of the most common bee species, allowing them to determine which plants the bees were visiting.

“From the survey, we found that the bee communities in the pollinator habitats were completely distinct from the bee communities in the distant soybean fields,” Levenson says. “The bee communities in the soybean fields adjacent to pollinator habitats were something of a mixture, including elements of both of the other groups. The habitat-adjacent fields were fairly similar to the distant soybean fields but had bee communities that were clearly influenced by the nearby pollinator habitat.”

“From the pollen samples, we learned that all of the bees we found in any of the soybean fields were actively visiting soybean flowers,” says April Sharp, co-author of the paper and a graduate student at NC State. 

The researchers also found that bees in the soybean fields located far from pollinator habitats were often leaving the soybean fields to visit flowers completely outside the study area. Bees in soybean fields that were adjacent to the pollinator habitat were less likely to leave the study area.

“This suggests that having pollinator habitat nearby is beneficial to bees in the soybean fields,” Levenson says.

To assess the impact on crop yields, researchers collected 30 soybean plants from each of the fields at harvest time. They counted the number of seeds – or soybeans – per pod, the total number of seeds per plant and the weight of those seeds.

“We found that the number of seeds was similar for fields near pollinator habitat and fields that were far away,” Levenson says. “However, plants in fields that were adjacent to pollinator habitat produced seeds that were 6.5 per cent heavier than the seeds from plants in distant fields.”

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Researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Kansas have shown that soil microbes — microscopic organisms like viruses, bacteria and fungi found throughout nature — play a role in the phenomenon of heterosis or hybrid vigour, the superior performance of crossed plant lines, or hybrids, over inbred plant lines.

Hybrids are often used by farmers for agricultural production due to superior crop yields.

Research into hybrid vigour has generally highlighted the roles of genetic and abiotic environmental factors behind the phenomenon. Finding that the biotic soil environment impacts heterosis was a bit surprising and serendipitous, researchers say.

“This work moves us toward a better understanding of what’s driving heterosis,” said Manuel Kleiner, an assistant professor of plant and microbial biology at North Carolina State and a corresponding author of a paper describing the research. 

“Microbes are critical players in causing effects on corn plants. It’s not just temperature and soil type.”

The researchers experimented with two types of inbred corn plants and a hybrid of those two lines in laboratory and field tests in North Carolina and Kansas.

They started by growing the corn plants in sterile bags. Both types of plants grew similarly sized roots and shoots inside the bags. But when the researchers added a controlled set of microbes known to associate with corn roots in nature, hybrid lines grew more than inbred lines. Their roots and shoots weighed more, showing the expected effects of heterosis.

“This seemed to be the result of a negative microbial effect on inbred lines, rather than a helping effect on hybrids,” Kleiner said.

Similar heterosis-enhancing activity of microbes was observed in field tests in North Carolina in which hybrid and inbred lines were grown in untreated plots, plots treated with an antimicrobial chemical and in plots treated with both the antimicrobial chemical and a method of “cooking” the soil by sending ultra-hot steam into it.

Surprisingly, when a similar experiment was performed in Kansas, the opposite effect was observed. Treatments that reduced the microbial populations in the soil caused increased heterosis.

“We can now say that microbes will have effects on heterosis, but we can’t predict the direction of those effects,” Kleiner said.

“We know that microbes are affecting inbreds and hybrids of corn in different ways, but the effects may depend on the environment or on the particular microbes in the soil,” said Peter Balint-Kurti, USDA professor of plant pathology at NC State and a paper co-author.

The researchers plan to continue studying the effects of microbes on corn heterosis.

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One key to capitalizing on such efforts, the researchers find, may be to build stronger ties between citizen science and agricultural extension efforts.

“We define citizen science as research in which non-scientists play a role in project development, data collection or discovery and which is subject to conventional peer review,” says Sean Ryan, lead author of a paper on the work. “Though citizen science has grown in popularity in recent decades, it isn’t a new idea. There are examples of what you might call citizen science dating back to ancient China, 3,500 years ago.

“Our goal with this work was to capture the extent to which modern citizen science has helped us address meaningful research questions related to agriculture and food,” says Ryan, who is a Citizen Science Fellow at North Carolina State University and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture.

“Has citizen science made a difference in tackling the global challenge of feeding a growing population in a changing climate? Could it do more?”

To assess the state of citizen science in agricultural research, the researchers analyzed hundreds of academic articles, singling out dozens of examples that address issues from crop pests and pathogens to biodiversity and ecosystem services. The researchers also looked at a number of ongoing projects that have not yet appeared in academic journals.

“In all of the areas we looked at, we found that citizen science has been used to both produce scientifically robust findings that address real-world issues and to engage the public,” Ryan says.

Specifically, the researchers found that – as long as a study was well designed – citizen science could produce solid findings, make a research project more cost effective and allow researchers to expand the scale of their studies dramatically.

“For example, enlisting farmers or gardeners in a study could give researchers access to samples across a broad geographic range, often on lands that researchers would not otherwise have access to,” Ryan says.

Another key idea to come out of the work is that agricultural extension and citizen science practitioners could learn from each other, and such partnerships hold a lot of potential for addressing agricultural research challenges.

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