Abstract

Adapting to climate change, maintaining food security, and halting the loss of biodiversity are just a few of the sustainability issues that automated phenotyping promises to solve. However, these issues are highly dependent on the crop genetic diversity utilized and can be traced back to plant breeding. Automated phenotyping is typically viewed from a technical point of view and valued for its benefits in plant breeding research by plant science and engineering. On the other hand, we present a perspective that is more comprehensive and inquire into the social, ecological, and technical impacts on the robustness of on-site crop genetic diversity from the breeding nursery where varieties for farming are produced to the laboratory. We contend that systemic robustness is impacted in two ways by automated phenotyping. By accelerating the breeding process, it enhances adaptive capacity on the one hand. However, its implementation may destabilize the system and have unanticipated negative effects on the genetic diversity of local crops. As a result, we call for the system's governance to explicitly monitor any potential side effects.