A Three-Dimensional Phenotyping Framework for Quantifying Soybean Resilience to Pest Stress in the Field

Abstract

Abstract Biotic stress is a major, yet under-quantified, driver of global soybean yield losses, and field-based phenotyping under pest pressure remains a critical bottleneck for crop improvement. Using multi-temporal data from soybean genotypes grown under insecticide-protected and unprotected conditions in Brazil, we present a UAV-based, large-scale and non-invasive framework for evaluating genotype performance under natural pest pressure. We introduce a three-dimensional metric that jointly captures productivity, feature-level similarity as a proxy for tolerance, and phenological response through days to maturity. This unified formulation enables field-based quantification of pest resilience and replaces labor-intensive and often unreliable direct pest collection and counting. To operationalize this framework, we integrate vegetation indices and self-supervised visual embeddings into a common representation space linking feature stability, performance response and phenological development. This approach enables robust identification of genotypes that maintain feature integrity, minimize developmental delay and sustain yield under pest pressure, with genotypic differences peaking during the pod-fill (R3–R4) and grain-fill (R5.1–R5.5) stages. Overall, this work establishes a scalable, field-ready paradigm for quantifying crop resilience to biotic stress and provides a practical pathway to accelerate breeding for stable yields under real-world agricultural conditions.

Code and data availability

The paper explicitly states that the analysis code is publicly available in the authors' GitHub repository (jianglong26/soybean-insect-resistance), which directly reproduces this paper's phenotyping pipeline (orthomosaic processing, VI/DINOv3 feature extraction, similarity analysis, genotype ranking). The paper also声明s