Progress 06/01/24 to 05/31/25

Outputs
Target Audience:Our target audience of academic/scientific professionals has heard about this project at a few conferences during the summer of2025. Changes/Problems:One major opportunity led to a change from the narrative: instead of in-house developing a training dataset and ML for Sub Obj. 2.1-2.4, we partnered with Steve Mirsky's USDA Beltsville Team and are using his "Plant Map 3D" (PM3D) system. We didn't know about the system during the grant proposal stage. PM3D team provided us with the sensor systems and we are adding our image and biomass data to their training model. In return, we expect biomass predictions to accomplish Sub-obj. 2.5 in particular. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Several graduate students, a post-doc and student workers are gaining experience through participation at various levels of the project. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Nothing Reported What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The second year of the field experiment and data collection covering Obj. 1 and Obj. 2 will be completed. We will analyze year 1 data to accomplish the first round of model training and genomic prediction validation (Sub-obj. 1.4-1.5) By the end of period two we may be able to start analysis for Obj. 3 and Obj. 4. We will hold another scientific advisory board meeting.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Obj. 1: Pilot genomic prediction as a decision-support tool for assessing the intercrop-ability of oats with peas, peas with oats and their specific combinations. Sub-objective 1.1: Develop The Triticeae Toolbox (T3) to better handle data from intercropping. Underway. Almost all datatypes are to be housed in the database. Some data are uploaded already, more in progress. Sub-objective 1.2: Increase seed for all downstream experiments. Successfully accomplished during Summer of 2024. Sub-objective 1.3: Conduct a multi-year, multi-location field trial evaluating the performance of 4,000 total oat-pea intercrop plots. The first year's field trial was conducted during Spring+Summer of 2025. All trials have harvested and seed processing and data prep are underway. Sub-objective 1.4: Train oat-pea intercrop genomic prediction models. Soon. Genotyping was completed during Summer of 2024 for both oat and pea germplasm sets. Obj. 2: Develop non-destructive, remote and proximal-sensing-based predictions of intercropped grain yield both overall and partitioned by species. Sub-objective 2.1: Capture seasonal timing of magnitude of growth using aerial multispectral imagery, up to seven times per growth period. This was accomplished for as many times, at as many locations as possible. Not all locations. Sub-objective 2.2: Collect ground-based non-destructive (proximal-sensing) data on intercropped canopy cover as a complement to aerial imaging. Completed during the Spring 2025 trial. Data are being captured with the PM3D system by the PSA group at USDA-ARS Beltsville. Sub-objective 2.3: Generate validation data for remote and proximal sensing by pairing up to four imaging timepoints with ground-based destructive harvests. Completed paired with each proximal-sensing mission. Sub-objective 2.4: Train supervised machine learning models to predict species-specific canopy traits and grain yield based on remote and/or proximal-sensing data. Nothing to report, yet. Sub-objective 2.5: Assess the benefit of integrating phenomic time series data into (genomic) predictions of growth curves, biomass, yield of oat-pea intercrops. Nothing to report, yet. Nothing to report yet forObj. 3andObj. 4. A project advisory board meeting was held in May 2025.

Publications