Early screening of salt-tolerant and high-yielding rice varieties via cost-effective UAV data

Breeding rice varieties that are both salt-tolerant and high-yielding is essential for utilizing saline-alkaline lands and ensuring food security. However, However, high-throughput and accurate phenotyping at early growth stages remains a major bottleneck in breeding programs. In this study, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imaging was employed to screen salt-tolerant and high-yielding varieties among 60 rice varieties under saline-alkaline field conditions. Red-green-blue (RGB), multispectral, and thermal canopy images were acquired throughout the growing season by UAV, from which 41 phenotypic traits were extracted at each growth stage. These traits were categorized into early-stage (tillering and jointing), late-stage (booting, flowering, and maturity), and whole-growth-stage (from tillering to maturity) and subsequently used to screen salt-tolerant and high-yielding rice varieties. Results showed that: (1) An early high-throughput screening method for salt-tolerant rice varieties was developed based on the membership function and UAV phenotypes (MFuav), achieving high performance (Precision >0.8, OA > 0.7). MFuav demonstrated the highest accuracy at the early-stage, with Precision increasing by 0.29 and 0.43 compared to the late- and whole-stage models, respectively. (2) A machine learning based UAV phenotypes framework (MLuav) was developed to further improve salt-tolerance screening performance. Within this framework, the partial least squares regression (PLSR) was employed for early-stage salt-tolerance screening, which achieved a Precision of 0.97 and an OA of 0.78, outperforming the MFuav by 0.11 and 0.08, respectively. In addition, within the same MLuav framework, early-stage UAV phenotypes were further used for actual yield prediction using a Random Forest (RF) model. The model achieved a high Recall for high-yielding varieties (Recall = 1.00), ensuring that no potentially high-yielding germplasm was missed, although this was accompanied by a moderate Precision (0.51) and an overall accuracy of 0.70. (3) The MLuav consistently outperformed the MFuav in screening salt-tolerant and high-yielding varieties across all 60 rice varieties. Among the five referenced salt-tolerant and high-yielding rice varieties, the MLuav correctly screened four using early-stage phenotypes, whereas the MFuav only screened three. Overall, the proposed method enables early screening of salt-tolerant and high-yielding rice varieties, offering an efficient tool for the screening and utilization of elite stress-resilient germplasm.