The Hardwood Genomics Database: Current Status and Future Directions after Four Years of Development

Forests and trees provide essential ecosystem services as well as critical industrial and economic value for society. Faced with pressures from climate change, invasive insects and habitat destruction from human activity, there is a growing need for tools and resources for more efficient tree management and improvement efforts in both natural forests and plantations. The Hardwood Genomics database is an online community website for hardwood tree genomics and genetics resources (hardwoodgenomics.org). It provides access to (a) integrated and curated datasets including transcriptomes, genomes, genetic maps, QTL maps, population resources, and phenotypes, (b) online tools to perform custom analysis and visualization of those data sets , and (c) outreach activities, presentations and progress reports to inform stakeholders of current research efforts and coming scientific resources.The site is built with the open source software package Tripal (Ficklin et al., 2011) and also utilizes the data visualization software packages Gbrowse (Stein, 2013), Symap (Soderlund et al., 2011) and CMap (Youens-Clark et al., 2009). Future development will include continued expansion to include more public data sets, introducing Tripal software innovations from other groups to our database and developing web services to promote database interoperability.This project is supported by grant # TRPGR IOS-1025974 from the National Science Foundation’s Plant Genome Research Program.