Frequent inventory data of container nurseries is needed by growers to ensure proper management and marketing strategies. In this paper, inventory data are estimated from aerial images. Since there are thousands of nursery species, it is difficult to find a generic classification algorithm for all cases. In this paper, the development of classification methods was confined to three representative categories: green foliage, yellow foliage, and flowering plants. Vegetation index thresholding and the support vector machine (SVM) were used for classification. Classification accuracies greater than 97% were obtained for each case. Based on the classification results, an algorithm based on canopy area mapping was built for counting. The effects of flight altitude, container spacing, and ground cover type were evaluated. Results showed that container spacing and interaction of container spacing with ground cover type have a significant effect on counting accuracy. To mimic the practical shipping and moving process, incomplete blocks with different voids were created. Results showed that the more plants removed from the block, the higher the accuracy. The developed algorithm was tested on irregular-or regular-shaped plants and plants with and without flowers to test the stability of the algorithm, and accuracies greater than 94% were obtained.2 of 20 approaches. To the best knowledge of the authors, only one research trial has been reported using aerial imagery to count container-grown nursery plants. Leiva [4] used Feature Analyst (Textron Systems, Providence, RI), an object-based image analysis software, to count open-field container nursery plants based on images collected by UAV. However, this method requires subjective user input and parameter settings, which could be a source of potential error. Moreover, directly applying methods developed via third-party software provides little flexibility and embedded cost to allow researchers or growers to develop customized methods for nursery counting.Although there is limited research focusing on application of imaging for container-grown nursery counting, there has been a long history of its broad application on other counting tasks in agriculture, such as fruit and tree counting. Wang et al. [11] used saturation, hue, and local maximum of specular reflections in four directions to detect apple pixels and then split touching apples and merged the occluded apple based on the estimate diameter. Payne at al. [12] segmented images into mango fruits and background with color information in red-green-blue (RGB), YCbCr space and texture information. Then a lower and an upper limit were applied to block size and subsequently estimate mango number. An automated kiwifruit counting technique was proposed so that kiwifruit was firstly extracted by minimum distance classification in L*a*b color space, and then a regression relationship was utilized to estimate the true fruit count [13]. Nuske et al. [14] detected grape locations using radial symmetry transformation and removed false p...