“PhenoWeek” at the INRAE centre in Avignon
From 24 to 27 March, the annual “PhenoWeek” meeting took place at the INRAE centre in Avignon: four days of discussions on digital phenotyping and envirotyping, organised as part of the combined general meetings of the AgroEcoPhen project and the PHENOME-EMPHASIS Research Infrastructure. The INRAE teams involved, Arvalis, Terres Inovia and GEVES, along with Phenome’s four sponsoring bodies, attended the event, which provided an opportunity to share the significant contributions of the AgroEcoPhen and Phenome projects to the development and application of digital technologies in agriculture.
The four days of “PhenoWeek” were devoted to the general meetings of the AgroEcoPhen project and then the IR PHENOME-EMPHASIS project. The new website was launched on this occasion. A joint day at the Arvalis research station in Gréoux-les-Bains provided an opportunity for the teams involved to exchange ideas. The phenotyping community gathered at the INRAE centre in Avignon to share the latest news on digital phenotyping, whether in the field for field crops, arboriculture and viticulture, or under controlled conditions, particularly for seeds. The INRAE units involved in these projects were of course present, as were Terres Inovia, Arvalis and GEVES, representing the seed component of the PHENOTIC platform based at SNES and the new PHENOVAR platform for variety phenotyping, deployed at GEVES’s experimental stations in Anjouère, Le Magneraud and Montpellier. The working groups and platforms presented their latest news and user feedback (particularly for PHENOTIC), their new projects, their synergies and the strategy for new platforms such as PHENOVAR. Considerable attention was also given to presenting the progress made by the “methodological nodes”, namely MCP-DEV (led by Marie Weiss of the EMMAH joint research unit in Avignon and David Rousseau of the ImorPhen team at the IRHS joint research unit in Angers), which focuses on methodological developments relating to vectors, sensors and analysis chains, as well as the MCP-DATA (led by Isabelle Alic from UMR MISTEA and Cyril Pommier from URGI), dedicated to data organisation/storage and the information system for PHIS field trials.
The training aspects for the teams involved were addressed through a presentation of feedback from the two training sessions organised in early 2026, the first in February at the INRAE centre in Clermont-Ferrand, focusing on the deployment of “AgroEcoPhen” connected stakes, and the second on the practice of “Deep Learning”, organised at the IRHS in Angers, which was unique in that it allowed each participant to work on their own datasets and case studies.
Other general topics were also discussed, such as the transformation of the PIA Phenome into a sustainable research infrastructure. In conclusion, this event highlighted the significant progress made through the AgroEcoPhen and Phenome projects in the development and application of digital technologies in agriculture.
