Wavelet Analysis of GPR Data for Belowground Mass Assessment of Sorghum Hybrid for Soil Carbon Sequestration

• Published in: Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 15; no. 15; p. 3832
• Main Authors: Wolfe, Matthew, Dobreva, Iliyana D., Ruiz-Guzman, Henry A., Huo, Da, Teare, Brody L., Adams, Tyler, Everett, Mark E., Bishop, Michael, Jessup, Russell, Hays, Dirk B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01-08-2023
• Subjects: Agricultural practices; Agriculture; Analysis; Antenna arrays; Antennas; Aquatic plants; Biomass; Breeding; Carbon; Carbon content; Carbon sequestration; Continuous wavelet transform; continuous wavelet transform (CWT); Crops; Data analysis; Dielectric properties; Emissions; Emissions control; Environmental aspects; Frequency analysis; Ground penetrating radar; ground-penetrating radar (GPR); Growth; Nondestructive testing; Phenotyping; Radar; Remote sensing; Rhizomes; Roots; Soils; Sorghum; Time-frequency analysis; Wavelet analysis; wavelet pseudo-frequency (WPF); wavelet pseudo-frequency density (WPFD); United States
• ISSN: 2072-4292; 2072-4292
• DOI: 10.3390/rs15153832

Among many agricultural practices proposed to cut carbon emissions in the next 30 years is the deposition of carbon in soils as plant matter. Adding rooting traits as part of a sequestration strategy would result in significantly increased carbon sequestration. Integrating these traits into production agriculture requires a belowground phenotyping method compatible with high-throughput breeding (i.e., rapid, inexpensive, reliable, and non-destructive). However, methods that fulfill these criteria currently do not exist. We hypothesized that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) could fill this need as a phenotypic selection tool. In this study, we employed a prototype GPR antenna array to scan and discriminate the root and rhizome mass of the perennial sorghum hybrid PSH09TX15. B-scan level time/discrete frequency analyses using continuous wavelet transform were utilized to extract features of interest that could be correlated to the biomass of the subsurface roots and rhizome. Time frequency analysis yielded strong correlations between radar features and belowground biomass (max R −0.91 for roots and −0.78 rhizomes, respectively) These results demonstrate that continued refinement of GPR data analysis workflows should yield an applicable phenotyping tool for breeding efforts in contexts where selection is otherwise impractical.