Global agricultural production has been pressured to attend the increasing demand for food, fibers, and energy and to adapt to the unstable weather conditions, such as unexpected long droughts and warmer temperatures. The only way to answer to such demands in time is by breeding more productive crops tolerant to severe weather conditions, especially biotic and abiotic stress. Thus, plant phenotyping is the key to accelerate the development of new species by providing non-invasive tools to understand the physiological and genetics basis of plant growth and adaptation.

While a revolution in phenomics is taking place in Europe, USA, and Oceania, plant phenotyping is still incipient in Latin America, despite being responsible for 16% of global exportations in food and agriculture. Latin America is a promising market for plant phenotyping not only because of its production potential, but also for its large biodiversity which could lead to new genetic materials. Brazil, in particular, maintains the third largest germplasm bank in the world.

The Second Latin-American Conference on Plant Phenotyping and Phenomics (II LAPhPB) aims to bring scientists from all over the world to discuss the current trends in plant phenotyping and to strengthen the Latin-American Plant Phenomics Network built during the first conference, which took place at the University of Talca (Chile) in 2015. The conference will cover the topics:

• Field Plant Phenotyping using the precision agriculture tools, elaboration of protocols to improve the yield and plant breeding;
• Novel Non-Invasive Technologies Instrumentation, Automation, Optical Methods, Sensors and Biosensors, Models, Softwares, Bioinformatics, Images and Digital signal processing to plant phenotyping, and High-Throughput plant phenotyping;
  
• Phenotyping for Crop Improvement and to Investigate Biotic and Abiotic Stress.

The conference will take place at Embrapa Instrumentação, São Carlos, SP, Brazil, from 20^th to 22^nd September, 2017. São Carlos, SP, is one of the Brazilian cities with high standards of scientific and technological developments, with two universities and two Embrapa research centers. The conference will consist of talks, poster presentations, workshops, as well as demonstrations and networking. In addition to the talks given by invited speakers, submitted abstracts will be selected for short presentations.

Companies interested to sponsor the II LAPhPB 2017 will have the chance to demonstrate their products during the conference.