Plant counting: origins, development, and future paths

Plant counting functions as a central role in the quantification system of plant phenotyping. Over the years, the field has evolved through successive technological paradigms, and its modern form has been strongly influenced by advances in visual counting from computer vision. In this review, we synthesize the historical origins of plant counting, assess its current fragmented landscape, and outline a roadmap toward standardized, universal plant counting systems. We propose a coherent conceptual framework- the four-level hierarchy of plant counting, which characterizes the environment, platform, sensor, and counting entity in biological organization -grounded in the need of high-throughput plant phenotyping. This framework aims to guide the development of plant counting systems that are not only accurate on individual dataset, but also reusable, comparable, and trustworthy across modern plant phenotyping scenarios. We argue that existing plant counting approaches are constrained by species-specific designs, sensor-dependent assumptions, and local, region-bound assessments. We hope this review can serve as a reference for building cross-species, cross-modal, and cross-scale visual plant counting systems.