Physiological causes of transplantation shock on rice growth inhibition and delayed heading

Transplanting is an important rice cultivation method; however, transplanting shock commonly affects grain yield, and the mechanisms underlying the inhibition of growth, development, and delayed heading caused by transplanting shock have not yet been clearly elucidated. Here, we investigated the effects of seedling age, temperature, and root damage during transplanting on growth, development, and time to heading, both under artificially controlled and natural day length. Additionally, we investigated the impact of seedling root growth space and the potential mitigating effects of residual seed nutrients on young transplanted seedlings. The delay in heading in transplanted versus directly seeded plants was affected more by growth inhibition during the seedling period than by root damage during transplanting. However, root damage had an effect on the inhibition of leaf and tiller development, and the ratio of leaves to tillers increased because tiller development was inhibited more by transplanting shock compared with leaf development. Based on these findings, we propose factors reflecting the delay in growth due to transplanting shock that should be included for more accurate rice phenology modeling and suggest advantageous seeding conditions and transplanting methods for improved rice cultivation and yield in response to climate change.

Rice growth vegetation index 2 for improving estimation of rice plant phenology in costal ecosystems

Crop growth is one of the most important parameters of a crop and its knowledge before harvest is essential to help farmers, scientists, governments and agribusiness. This paper provides a novel demonstration of the use of freely available Sentinel-2 data to estimate rice crop growth in a single year. Sentinel 2 data provides frequent and consistent information to facilitate coastal monitoring from field scales. The aims of this study were to modify the rice growth vegetation index to improve rice growth phenology in the coastal areas. The rice growth vegetation index 2 is the best vegetation index, compared with 11 vegetation indices, plant height and biomass. The results demonstrate that the coefficient of rice growth vegetation index 2 was 0.83, has the highest correlation with plant height. Rice growth vegetation index 2 is more appropriate for enhancing and obtaining rice phenology information. This study analyses the best spectral vegetation indices for estimating rice growth.

Monitoring Hybrid Rice Phenology at Initial Heading Stage Based on Low-Altitude Remote Sensing Data

Accurate monitoring of hybrid rice phenology (RP) is crucial for breeding rice cultivars and controlling fertilizing amount. The aim of this study is to monitor the exact date of hybrid rice initial heading stage (IHSDAS) based on low-altitude remote sensing data and analyze the influence factors of RP. In this study, six field experiments were conducted in Ezhou city and Lingshui city from 2016 to 2019, which involved different rice cultivars and nitrogen rates. Three low-altitude remote sensing platforms were used to collect rice canopy reflectance. Firstly, we compared the performance of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and red edge chlorophyll index (CIred edge) for monitoring RP. Secondly, double logistic function (DLF), asymmetric gauss function (AGF), and symmetric gauss function (SGF) were used to fit time-series CIred edge for acquiring phenological curves (PC), the feature: maximum curvature (MC) of PC was extracted to monitor IHSDAS. Finally, we analyzed the influence of rice cultivars, N rates, and air temperature on RP. The results indicated that CIred edge was more appropriate than NDVI for monitoring RP without saturation problem. Compared with DLF and AGF, SGF could fit CIred edge without over fitting problem. MC of SGF_CIred edge from all three platforms showed good performance in monitoring IHSDAS with good robustness, R2 varied between 0.82 and 0.95, RMSE ranged from 2.31 to 3.81. In addition, the results demonstrated that high air temperature might cause a decrease of IHSDAS, and the growth process of rice was delayed when more nitrogen fertilizer was applied before IHSDAS. This study illustrated that low-altitude remote sensing technology could be used for monitoring field-scale hybrid rice IHSDAS accurately.