Dr Robert Jackson

As Deputy Programme Leader for Crop Phenotyping at NIAB’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Sciences group, I lead research that harnesses AI-driven technologies to transform how we measure and understand crop performance. My work spans the full range of phenotyping approaches, from drones in the field to high-throughput glasshouse imaging and hyperspectral laboratory analysis.

I specialise in drone-based remote sensing to monitor crop health, growth, and resilience under real-world conditions. Working with an interdisciplinary team, we integrate crop, genetic, and environmental data to create open-source tools that tackle yield, quality, and disease challenges in the UK’s most important crops.

Publications

• OrchardQuant‐3D: combining drone and LiDAR to perform scalable 3D phenotyping for characterising key canopy and floral traits in fruit orchards (2025) Plant Biotechnology Journal.
• GSP-AI: An AI-Powered Platform for Identifying Key Growth Stages and the Vegetative-to-Reproductive Transition in Wheat Using Trilateral Drone Imagery and Meteorological Data (2024) Plant Phenomics.
• The Use of Low-Cost Drone and Multi-Trait Analysis to Identify High Nitrogen Use Lines for Wheat Improvement (2024) Agronomy.
• Phenomic and genomic prediction of yield on multiple locations in winter wheat (2023) Frontiers in Genetics.
• AirMeasurer: open‐source software to quantify static and dynamic traits derived from multiseason aerial phenotyping to empower genetic mapping studies in rice (2022) New Phytologist.

Full publication list on ResearchGate.

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