The Light-Induced Fluorescence Transient (LIFT) sensor was mounted on a manually pushed cart to retrieve chlorophyll fluorescence-based traits over multiple days in a large panel of durum wheat genotypes (> 220 elite accessions from the association mapping population ‘UNIBO-Durum Panel’ assembled at the University of Bologna, Italy) subjected to a progressive drought in replicated field trials over two growing seasons (2017/2018 and 2018/2019) in Maricopa, Arizona, USA, a semiarid desert environment. The photosynthetic performance of light-adapted plants was non-invasively measured at the canopy level (at a distance of 60 cm) by means of the operating efficiency of Photosystem II (Fq'/Fm') and the kinetics of electron transport beyond Qa measured by reoxidation rates (Fr1' and Fr2'). Herein, processed and cleaned datasets, as well as raw data for both growing seasons are made publicly available. The R scripts used for processing and cleaning these data are also available.

{"references": ["Condorelli, Giuseppe E. et al. (2018) Comparative aerial and ground based high throughput phenotyping for the genetic dissection of NDVI as a proxy for drought adaptive traits in durum wheat. Frontiers in Plant Science, 9, 893. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2018.00893", "Keller, Beat et al. (2019) Maximum fluorescence and electron transport kinetics determined by light-induced fluorescence transients (LIFT) for photosynthesis phenotyping. Photosynthesis Research, 140, 221-233. doi: 10.1007/s11120-018-0594-9", "Kolber, Zbigniew S. et al. (1998) Measurements of variable chlorophyll fluorescence using fast repetition rate techniques: defining methodology and experimental protocols. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, 1367(1-3), 88-106. doi: 10.1016/S0005-2728(98)00135-2", "Maccaferri, Marco et al. (2006) A panel of elite accessions of durum wheat (Triticum durum Desf.) suitable for association mapping studies. Plant Genetic Resources, 4(1), 79-85. doi:10.1079/PGR2006117"]}

Overall questions related to the field phenotyping set-up, including the LIFT method and datasets, can be directly addressed to Nicolas Zendonadi dos Santos and/or Dr. Onno Muller at the Forschungszentrum Juelich, Institute of Bio- and Geosciences, IBG-2: Plant Sciences, Juelich, Germany. Specific questions regarding the genetic material ('UNIBO-Durum Panel') can be directly addressed to Prof. Dr. Roberto Tuberosa and/or Dr. Marco Maccaferri at the University of Bologna, Department of Agricultural and Foods Sciences, Bologna, Italy.