Measuring leaf area of winter cereals by different techniques: A comparison

Leaf area (la) is an important parameter to evaluate many traits of plants like canopy,photosynthesis and evapotranspiration. digital scanners and cameras,in combination with digital image processing software,have replaced older leaf area measuring techniques to determine la. an experiment was conducted at research area of department of agronomy,bahauddin zakariya university multan,pakistan during 2014-15 to find an easy and precise method of leaf area measurement of selected winter cereals i.e. wheat,barley and oat. digital image analyzer techniques viz. easy leaf area (ela) and image j (ij) were compared with manual method. the results showed that there was a difference in values recorded by digital analyzer techniques and manual method. the coefficient of determination (r2) for leaf area measuring techniques viz.,manual vs easy leaf area,manual vs image j,and easy leaf area vs image j ranged from 0.53 to 0.72,0.90 to 0.93 and 0.66 to 0.73,respectively for different sowing dates for selected winter cereals. while,similar values for selected winter cereals cultivars were 0.25 to 0.98,0.74 to 0.97 and 0.49 to 0.93,respectively. however,it is clear from the results that digital analyzer techniques were capable for estimating precisely. the data showed using image j software was much accurate than easy leaf area. further,it was found that darkness in image,size of image and quality of image influenced the la values of winter cereals. however,further application of these digital image analyzers (easy leaf area and image j) for leaf area measurements may be used in other field crops.