Tracking Darwin's footprints but with LiDAR for booting up the 3D and even beyond-3D understanding of plant intelligence

Abstract

As an emerging subject of the implication on revolutionizing many fields from botany to life science, plant intelligence (PI) has been actively studied but also trapped in debate. Inspired by those earlier botanists such as Darwin conceiving this concept when observing plants outdoors, we propose to track Darwin's footprints – go again to the wild where plants show higher-fold adapting performance than in labs for arousing a re-cognition of PI. However, this plan must face a basic challenge on in-situ plant phenotyping, especially in structure, which serves as the three-dimensional (3D) phenomenological display of varying PI behaviors. Aiming at this core bottleneck, we suggest to go but with 3D remote/proximal sensing (R/PS) devices such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) – a state-of-the-art technology of fully but fine mapping plants, for starting a 3D cognition of PI. Further, to decode the mechanism of PI occurring, we preview the next-generation (e.g., hyperspectral, fluorescence, and polarization) LiDAR with the latent capacity on all-round phenotyping of plants. Their derived 3D biochemical, physiological, and biophysical functional traits can arouse a beyond-3D cognition of PI. Overall, this theoretical prospect, with the available R/PS technology traced for upgrading PI from conceptual debating to mechanistic understanding, can advance the PI field into its 3D and even beyond-3D times and bring the PI and PI-relevant sciences such as sustainability cognition to breathe new life.