Leveraging plant physiological dynamics using physical reservoir computing

Abstract

Plants are complex organisms subject to variable environmental conditions, which influence their physiology and phenotype dynamically. We propose to interpret plants as reservoirs in physical reservoir computing. The physical reservoir computing paradigm originates from computer science; instead of relying on Boolean circuits to perform computations, any substrate that exhibits complex non-linear and temporal dynamics can serve as a computing element. Here, we present the first application of physical reservoir computing with plants. In addition to investigating classical benchmark tasks, we show that Fragaria × ananassa (strawberry) plants can solve environmental and eco-physiological tasks using only eight leaf thickness sensors. Although the results indicate that plants are not suitable for general-purpose computation but are well-suited for eco-physiological tasks such as photosynthetic rate and transpiration rate. Having the means to investigate the information processing by plants improves quantification and understanding of integrative plant responses to dynamic changes in their environment. This first demonstration of physical reservoir computing with plants is key for transitioning towards a holistic view of phenotyping and early stress detection in precision agriculture applications since physical reservoir computing enables us to analyse plant responses in a general way: environmental changes are processed by plants to optimise their phenotype.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の葉厚センサーを用いた物理リザバーコンピューティングを提案・実証し、光合成速度や蒸散速度などの生理形質推定とストレス早期検出への応用を中心に扱うため、植物フェノタイピング手法として適格。

Code and data availability

The paper's Data availability statement explicitly deposits the datasets generated/analysed (leaf thickness sensor traces, environmental variables, gas exchange data) on Zenodo and the analysis data/code on a public GitHub repository, both with exact URLs matching allowed_urls.