Image Credit: Photosynq Crowdsourcing Plant Data

“We are building a low cost, handheld device which researchers, educators, and citizen scientists can use to build a global database of plant health.”

Summary
The Photosynq platform starts with a Arduino compatible hand-held device which connects to your cell phone and measures fluorescence and absorbance of photosynthetic plants and algae in a non-destructive way.

These measurements provide a detailed picture of the health of the plant and are used for plant breeding, improving plant efficiency, and to identify novel photosynthetic pathways for energy and crop research. Existing field-portable fluorescence and absorbance devices cost thousands of dollars and are too expensive for plant breeders in the developing world. In addition, these devices use proprietary software and hardware, so each user experience and dataset is isolated.

We believe that phenomic plant data, like genomic data, is a critical global resource and must both be shared and agglomerated to be useful.