Abstract
Phenotyping plays an important role in crop science and breeding programs. The accurate, rapid acquisition of phenotypic information on plants in different environments helps researchers explore the genomes' inheritance and expression patterns and determine the association of genomic and phenotypic information and ultimately increase crop yields. Traditional methods for acquiring crop traits (e.g., plant height, biomass, yield, etc.) rely on manual sampling, which is laborious and time-consuming. Fortunately, technological advances are resolving the high-throughput phenotyping bottleneck. To optimize the benefit of breeding programs in West Africa (WA) on the sustainability and performance of cropping systems (considering climate change and agroecological transition) developing high throughput field phenotyping methods is essential. However, the establishment of this type of activity requires infrastructure, equipment, management, and most importantly, dedicated and trained staff. Also, new technologies like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have recently become an important tool for fast and non-destructive high throughput phenotyping. This technology is flexible, practical, and provides easy access to data and high spatial resolution. UAVs are powerful tools for phenomics and genomics studies. As such, CERAAS and its partners are developing a field phenotyping network in the West African sub-region - the general scheme of which is presented below.