Hyderabad: Vice-chancellor of Sri Konda Laxman Telangana Horticultural University Dr D Raji Reddy has said that the Internet of Things (IoT) is going to be the future of horticulture, where horticultural crops will be mapped using remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) in the near future.

He was addressing the “International workshop on GIS for Plant Biodiversity” held at the Horticultural University in Mulugu on Wednesday, December 25.

Addressing the experts who attended the workshop, he said that DNA finger-printing and genome sequencing of important vegetables, fruits and medicinal plants will be done in the near future.

He explained that specific models of plants will be developed using artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning techniques.

“GIS and remote sensing will be highly useful for faster availability of data. The university will work on these in the near future,” he informed the participants who came from across the country and beyond.

“Disentangling phylogenetic relationships in citrus and its relatives with complete chloroplast genomes and conserved nuclear genomes” was discussed in the context of the research applied to the case of Japanese flora and exploring the world’s plant resources using GIS.

Dr Shyam Saran Shrestha, program coordinator at Shraddha Institute of Health Sciences and president of Himalayan Research and Development Center, Nepal, spoke on the topic “Bio-prospecting medicinal plants of Nepal, Italy and Japan.”