Evaluating the Performance of Hyperspectral Leaf Reflectance to Detect Water Stress and Estimation of Photosynthetic Capacities

Advanced techniques capable of early, rapid, and nondestructive detection of the impacts of drought on fruit tree and the measurement of the underlying photosynthetic traits on a large scale are necessary to meet the challenges of precision farming and full prediction of yield increases. We tested the application of hyperspectral reflectance as a high-throughput phenotyping approach for early identification of water stress and rapid assessment of leaf photosynthetic traits in citrus trees by conducting a greenhouse experiment. To this end, photosynthetic CO2 assimilation rate (Pn), stomatal conductance (Cond) and transpiration rate (Trmmol) were measured with gas-exchange approaches alongside measurements of leaf hyperspectral reflectance from citrus grown across a gradient of soil drought levels six times, during 20 days of stress induction and 13 days of rewatering. Water stress caused Pn, Cond, and Trmmol rapid and continuous decline throughout the entire drought period. The upper layer was more sensitive to drought than middle and lower layers. Water stress could also bring continuous and dynamic changes of the mean spectral reflectance and absorptance over time. After trees were rewatered, these differences were not obvious. The original reflectance spectra of the four water stresses were surprisingly of low diversity and could not track drought responses, whereas specific hyperspectral spectral vegetation indices (SVIs) and absorption features or wavelength position variables presented great potential. The following machine-learning algorithms: random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), gradient boost (GDboost), and adaptive boosting (Adaboost) were used to develop a measure of photosynthesis from leaf reflectance spectra. The performance of four machine-learning algorithms were assessed, and RF algorithm yielded the highest predictive power for predicting photosynthetic parameters (R2 was 0.92, 0.89, and 0.88 for Pn, Cond, and Trmmol, respectively). Our results indicated that leaf hyperspectral reflectance is a reliable and stable method for monitoring water stress and yield increase, with great potential to be applied in large-scale orchards.