Project description
The environmental impact on seed shape
Research on modern seeds has revealed that their form is affected by environmental conditions and cultivation systems. Although seed form contains great information, there are no modern agronomical or archaeobotanical studies on the matter because it is researched using geometric morphometrics that cannot fully exploit the small size of grains. The EU-funded iShape3DSeed project will develop an innovative, non-destructive and cost-affordable methodological toolkit that will allow obtaining a detailed analysis of seeds and to detect the environmental impact. The project will focus on cereals and use crops from the pre-mechanisation era and archaeological material from four Aegean Bronze Age sites. It will apply pioneering technologies, subjecting the data collected into machine learning algorithms to codify and couple seed form and agricultural data.
Objective
Research on modern seeds has shown that their shape reflects the influence of environmental growth conditions, including cultivation regimes. However, no modern agronomical or archaeobotanical studies have so far exploited this immense potential of information encompassed in seed shape. The main reason is that shape in these disciplines is currently studied using geometric morphometrics (GMM) but, largely due to the small size of grains, this is limited to 2D and semi-3D landmark measurements that cannot take advantage of the full, complex shape of the crops. iShape3DSeed will tackle this problem by employing cutting-edge emerging technologies and a novel combination of high-resolution 3D modelling of seeds, geometric morphometrics and machine learning (ML). The aim is to develop a novel, non-destructive and low-cost methodological toolkit that will allow using the full 3D shape of seeds to provide in-depth interpretations on agricultural management and distinguish environmental impact. To do so iShape3DSeed will focus on cereals and will use material from the Greek Genetic Bank that includes pre-mechanisation crops with their growing information, experimental cultivation of traditional cereal varieties, and archaeological material from four Aegean Bronze Age sites. The modern material will be used to develop and test the new toolkit, and the ancient to allow and test its archaeological application. The modern material will be also experimentally charred to test preservation impact on shape. The seeds will be reconstructed using micro 3D photogrammetry and will then be subjected to 3D GMM and surface texture analyses. The data obtained will be fed into purposely developed ML algorithms to classify and match shape and agricultural data. iShape3DSeed will provide thus a new means to identify agricultural management regimes in archaeological seed assemblages solely using the full shape of cereal seeds, pushing the frontiers of archaeobotany.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
43003 Tarragona
Spain