Quantifying the reproductive progression of sunflower using FIJI (Image J).

Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) is today the third leading oilseed crop in the world and seed yield is a valuable trait for breeders and researchers. The sunflower capitulum is composed of 700 to 3000 individual flowers on a flattered receptacle. Most reproductive stages (R5 to R6) have at least two disc flower phenophase's coexisting in the same receptacle (E1 to E4). Today, researchers in agroecology and breeders manually quantify the number of disc flowers that achieve the anthesis at different developmental stages of the receptacle. The presented method applies a bioinformatic tool to estimate: (1) the number of disc flowers of each phenophase that are constituting the sunflower´s capitula at different reproductive stages and, (2) the number of developing seeds of each sunflower capitulum. The ImageJ software was used as an image-analysis tool on sunflower capitula photographs. A use case and method validation for each presented protocol is provided. This method will contribute to correlation analysis in agroecological studies and also would be useful for the early prediction of seed yield in breeding programs.•This is a simple method for the estimation of the number of disc flowers at each phenophase in the sunflower receptacle.•It is based on integrating the knowledge of sunflower reproductive development with an open-source image analysis platform applied in single workflows.•This is a precise, non-destructive, rapid, and low-cost method; thus, it has the potential to be adopted as a phenotyping tool for sunflower breeding and research in agroecology.