Abstract. The photochemical reflectance index (PRI) has emerged to be a pre-visual indicator of water stress. However, whether the varying shadow fraction, which may be caused by multiple view angles or the changing crop density in the field, affects the performance of PRI in detecting water stress of crops is still uncertain. This study evaluated the impact of the varying shadow fraction on estimating relative water content (RWC) across growth stages of winter wheat using different formulations of PRI. Results demonstrated that PRI570, PRI1, and PRI2 of shadow were higher than those of sunlit leaves for unstressed plants, but the contrary results were achieved for stressed plants. Despite the difference between PRI_shadow and PRI_leaf, the significance of the linear relationship between RWC and PRI did not change with the different ratio of sunlit leaves and shadow. For most studied PRI formulations, the slope and intercept of the linear regression model between PRI and RWC changed proportionally with the shadow fractions. We applied a uniform RWC prediction model to the data of varying shadow fractions and found that the accuracy of RWC predictions was not significantly affected, indicating that the effect of varying shadow fractions was minimal to the seasonal water stress detection in winter wheat using PRI.