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EMPHASIS

EMPHASIS, the European Infrastructure for Plant Phenotyping, embodies a visionary commitment to advancing our understanding of plant performance and leveraging this knowledge to enhance future food security and agri-business, especially in the face of a changing climate. At its core, plant phenotyping serves as a powerful scientific tool to investigate the intricate interactions between plants and their environment.
Plant phenotyping has emerged as a crucial scientific tool, addressing the bottleneck in the development of crop varieties with increased yield, nutrient efficiency, or tolerance to diseases. Despite the rapid progress in genotyping, plant phenotyping is essential to enable researchers to understand plant-environment interactions and transfer this understanding in selecting desirable genotypes in plant breeding and use them in different agricultural management scenarios. EMPHASIS addresses this challenge by integrating the European plant phenotyping infrastructure, thereby facilitating accelerated development, and increasing availability of phenotyping facilities.
The mission of EMPHASIS is clear: to facilitate multi-scale plant phenotyping, analyse genotype performance across various environments, and quantify the diversity of plant traits. To achieve this mission, EMPHASIS sets forth ambitious objectives:
Develop an integrated pan-European infrastructure comprising a holistic approach to plant phenotyping with instrumented facilities tailored for controlled conditions, intensive field studies, and lean field observations and computational services for data analysis and integration.
Establish seamless data acquisition and management systems linked to a European-level information system and modelling platforms.
Foster the development, evaluation, and dissemination of knowledge and cutting-edge technologies to advance plant phenotyping.
By harnessing the power of plant phenotyping and fostering collaboration across Europe, EMPHASIS not only advances scientific understanding but also contributes to broader global goals. Through its efforts, EMPHASIS paves the way for resilient, sustainable, and innovative approaches to plant production and agriculture in an era of unprecedented environmental challenges.