Plant Phenotyping using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Comprehensive Review

Phenotyping plays an important role in agricultural research for determining the various traits of plants. To investigate the inheritance and expression patterns of the genome and discover how genomic and phenotypic information is related to boosting agricultural output, it is important to precisely and rapidly gather phenotypic information of plants or cells in various conditions. Manually measuring, processing, and analyzing the data of plant phenotypes such as yield, biomass, leaf color, size, plant height, chlorophyll, and density is a laborious and time-consuming procedure. To overcome such issues and precisely execute high-throughput phenotyping and analysis, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been developed. This review focuses on the benefits of UAV-based remote sensing of various features utilizing different phenotyping sensors. The phenotyping sensors and UAV platforms are briefly introduced in this study. A more thorough introduction and summary of the uses of UAVs to collect and evaluate plant phenotypic characteristics is provided. Furthermore, the future prospects and the challenges of phenotype information through UAVs are also discussed. It aims to inform readers and researchers about the existing uses of UAVs for high-throughput phenotyping as well as the methodology used in the studies. The review proposes the applications of UAVs for advancements in agriculture to meet future needs.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  International Journal of Plant and Environment

• Publication date

  2025-03-22

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.18811/ijpen.v10i04.02
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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