Capturing Thermal Distributions and Variations in Crop Canopies

This application note describes how Australian researchers developed a high resolution aerial thermography solution for the rapid measurement of crop canopy temperature in the field. The CSIRO research demonstrates how canopy temperature is a strong indicator of how well a plant is managing its water use through stomatal responses to environment conditions such as drought or salinity levels. The high resolution and high throughput capability of the HeliPod™ thermal imaging system, which incorporates the FLIR thermal imaging camera, enables small differences in temperature to be detected between plant varieties making it a powerful phenotyping tool for large-scale experiments.