Global warming poses a substantial threat to food security, necessitating the development of crops resilient to the adverse effects of stress including, drought, heat, and their combined impact. To understand maize responses to individual and combined stress conditions of drought and heat at early vegetative stages, we did a comprehensive evaluation of the phenotypic responses of 47 diverse maize inbred lines. The plants were stressed for 13 days beginning at 7 days after planting, with heat stress conditions of 38/28°C day/night cycles, and the drought condition was achieved by reducing the water pot volume from 88 to 40% over the course of the experiment. The Bellwether Phenotyping Facility, a high-throughput phenotyping platform, was used to capture daily RGB images of the plants throughout the experiment. We extracted morphological and color-related traits from the images, and particular interest was placed on traits that exhibited high broad-sense heritability throughout the experiment. This approach allowed for the collection of a robust dataset of phenotypic responses. Our results revealed distinct responses among the maize genotypes under different stress conditions, with the combined drought and heat treatment leading to the most severe impairments in plant height and leaf area. To gain further insights, we applied a time series analysis to the extracted traits and created groups with dynamically-similar response patterns. This research is foundational for understanding maize stress responses to heat and drought conditions and will inform future work towards identifying important genes and molecular mechanisms, particularly in the context of combined stressors.
