Using vegetation indices derived from conventional digital cameras as selection criteria for wheat breeding in water‐limited environments

Abstract The ability to assess green biomass is of particular interest in a number of wheat breeding environments. However, the measurement of this and similar traits is either tedious and time‐consuming or requires the use of expensive, sophisticated equipment, such as field‐based spectroradiometers to measure vegetation indices (VIs). Here, conventional digital cameras are proposed as affordable and easy‐to‐use tools for gathering field data in wheat breeding programmes. Using appropriate software, a large set of images can be automatically processed to calculate a number of VIs, based on the performance of simple colour operations on each picture. The purpose of this study was to identify a set of picture‐derived vegetation indices (picVIs) and to evaluate their performance in durum wheat trials…