A short review: Comparisons of high-throughput phenotyping methods for detecting drought tolerance

Abstract

Drought is a major threat worldwide for crop production, especially due to the rapid climate changes. Current drought solutions involve improving irrigation system, rainwater harvesting, damming, cloud seeding, and changes of cultivation methods. Despite effective, each solution has economic, environmental, and temporal drawbacks. Among all solutions, the most effective, inexpensive and manageable method is the use of drought-tolerant cultivars via plant breeding. However, conventional plant breeding is a time-consuming and laborious task, especially for phenotypic data acquisition of target traits of numerous progenies. High-throughput phenotyping (HTP) is a recently developed method and has potential to overcome the mentioned issues. HTP offers massive, accurate, rapid, and automatic data acquisition in the breeding procedure and can be a breakthrough for developing drought resistant/tolerant cultivars. This study introduces various methods of HTP to detect drought stress, which can accelerate the breeding processes of drought-tolerant cultivars to provide helpful guidelines for breeders and researchers to choose appropriate methods.