The Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Centre will receive €5.4 million for a five-year upgrade of its crop phenotyping facility, adding advanced imaging, drones, AI tools and field research capacity to support crop resilience and sustainable food production.
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NPEC upgrade will combine next-generation imaging, drones and AI to help researchers study crop performance under changing environmental conditions.
The Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Centre (NPEC) has secured funding for a major five-year upgrade aimed at strengthening research into crop growth, climate resilience and sustainable food production.
The funding was awarded through the Dutch Research Council’s Large-Scale Research Infrastructure Upgrade call to Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Utrecht University (UU).
The NPEC 2.0 project has a total budget of €5.4 million, supported by additional institutional contributions from WUR, UU and the Jan IngenHousz Institute, an independent photosynthesis research institute based at Wageningen Campus, according to a press release.
Tracking Crop Performance From the Lab to the Field
NPEC is a national plant eco-phenotyping facility that allows researchers to measure how crops and other plants grow and respond to their environment. Experiments can range from Petri dishes and controlled growth chambers to outdoor plots under natural field conditions.
Since its launch in 2018, the facility has supported hundreds of experiments and generated more than 250 terabytes of phenotyping data. Its work has contributed to numerous peer-reviewed publications, student theses and research programmes.
These include individual Ph.D. projects and large-scale collaborations such as CropXR, a National Growth Fund initiative focused on developing more resilient crops, and the Jan IngenHousz Institute.
New Equipment Will Expand Field and Controlled-Environment Research
The upgrade will address three primary needs: modernizing NPEC’s equipment, incorporating machine learning and artificial intelligence into its data infrastructure, and expanding its operational team to integrate the new technologies.
Planned investments include open-air Ecotron units designed for ecologically realistic outdoor experiments and an intact soil-core extractor that will allow researchers to fill the units with undisturbed soil samples.
NPEC will also add a full-field X-ray fluorescence camera capable of producing non-invasive elemental images of living plants. According to the centre, it will be the first system of its kind installed in a high-throughput growth chamber anywhere in the world.
Next-generation drones equipped with soil-moisture sensors and hyperspectral imaging technology will further expand the facility’s capacity to monitor crop performance in the field.
AI Tools Will Help Researchers Interpret Crop Data
New data science specialists will develop automated pipelines and standardized tools to help researchers extract more scientific value from NPEC’s extensive datasets.
The tools will also support greater use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse crop growth, development and environmental responses.
“This upgrade will transform NPEC from a high-quality data-generating platform into an even more versatile, intelligent decision-support engine for the green life sciences,” said Prof. dr. Mark Aarts of Wageningen University & Research, main applicant of the NPEC 2.0 upgrade. “With these new capabilities, we can meet the increasing demand in the plant sciences domain for more detailed, time-resolved measurements of plant performance in controlled and natural conditions. We can also better assist researchers in interpreting the vast amount of data typically obtained in modern plant phenotyping.”
Upgraded Facility Will Serve Crop Researchers Across Sectors
NPEC is jointly operated by WUR and UU. It also serves as the Dutch national node of EMPHASIS, the European plant phenotyping infrastructure included on the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures roadmap.
The upgraded facility will be available to researchers from academia, industry and the public sector. Capacity will be allocated to fundamental research, public-private partnerships and international users.
The five-year NPEC 2.0 programme is scheduled to begin in autumn 2026.
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