Cooler canopy leverages sorghum adaptation to drought and heat stress.

Abstract

In the present study, individual and combined effects of drought and heat stress were investigated on key physiological parameters (canopy temperature, membrane stability index, chlorophyll content, relative water content, and chlorophyll fluorescence) in two popular sorghum cultivars (Sorghum bicolor cvs. Phule Revati and Phule Vasudha) during the seedling stage. Estimating canopy temperature through pixel-wise analysis of thermal images of plants differentiated the stress responses of sorghum cultivars more effectively than the conventional way of recording canopy temperature. Cultivar difference in maintaining the canopy temperature was also responsible for much of the variation found in critical plant physiological parameters such as cell membrane stability, chlorophyll content, and chlorophyll fluorescence in plants exposed to stress. Hence, the combined stress of drought and heat was more adverse than their individual impacts. The continued loss of water coupled with high-temperature exposure exacerbated the adverse effect of stresses with a remarkable increase in canopy temperature. However, Phule Vasudha, being a drought-tolerant variety, was relatively less affected by the imposed stress conditions than Phule Revati. Besides, the methodology of measuring and reporting plant canopy temperature, which emerged from this study, can effectively differentiate the sorghum genotypes under the combined stress of drought and heat. It can help select promising genotypes among the breeding lines and integrating the concept in the protocol for precision water management in crops like sorghum.

Plant phenotyping relevance

熱画像のピクセル単位解析による植物キャノピー温度の測定・報告法を開発し、ソルガム遺伝子型のストレス応答識別に応用しており、表現型取得法が実質的に扱われている。

Code and data availability

The paper reports sorghum canopy temperature (thermal image pixel-wise analysis) and physiological measurements, but the Data availability statement says all relevant data are included within the article only. No public phenotype dataset, thermal images, analysis code, or trained model is deposited; no repository or作者-

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