NordPheno Project Selected for NordForsk Funding

We are pleased to announce that our proposal Nordic Research Infrastructure Hub for Digital Plant Phenotyping (NordPheno) has been selected for funding by NordForsk. The highly competitive call received 50 eligible applications, and NordPheno was awarded 5.48 M NOK to build a cutting-edge Nordic research infrastructure for next-generation plant phenotyping.

The NordForsk Board’s decision follows an international peer-review process in which NordPheno received an overall grade of 7 – Outstanding. The evaluation highlights the project’s strong scientific vision, its ability to bridge agricultural and digital sciences, and its potential to position the Nordic region as a global leader in sustainable, data-driven crop research.

NordPheno brings together eight institutions across Finland (UH), Norway (PheNo – NMBU, UiT, UiO, NTNU, NIBIO), Sweden (SLU), and Denmark (UCPH). Together, the partners will develop shared research infrastructure, AI-driven phenotyping pipelines, a Nordic Plant Data Hub, and comprehensive training programs that build interdisciplinary expertise across the region. The initiative is expected to accelerate the development of climate-resilient crop varieties and contribute to Nordic and global food security.

Purpose of the NordPheno Initiative

NordPheno aims to unite plant science with advanced digital technologies—AI, IoT sensing, and edge computing—to modernize and scale plant phenotyping across the Nordic region. Its goals include:

• Closing the gap between agricultural and digital sciences to enable high-throughput, automated trait analysis.
• Establishing a shared Nordic Plant Data Hub for phenotypic, genomic, and environmental data.
• Developing AI-driven tools, digital twins, and smart sensing systems to speed up the breeding of climate-resilient crops.
• Strengthening Nordic collaboration, training, and researcher mobility to build a new interdisciplinary workforce.
• Supporting sustainable agriculture and food security through more efficient crop modelling and selection.

Looking Ahead

Over the next five years, NordPheno will run extensive activities including research mobilities, workshops, training courses, and stakeholder engagement events designed to build a robust, long-term Nordic research community in digital plant phenotyping.

We look forward to beginning this collaboration and taking the next steps in establishing this transformative Nordic research hub.

The first activity in this new network is a data management workshop that will take place here at NMBU already 11^th-13^th of March 2026. It will be three days of both keynote lectures and hands-on training in handling plant phenotyping data and creating FAIR datasets. More details will be announced soon.