Data Management and Analysis Solutions for Maize Predictive Phenomics: A Partnership with the GxE Subgroup of the Genomes to Fields (G2F) Initiative

Breeding decisions to develop improved cultivars for industrial and agricultural uses are greatly facilitated by simultaneously leveraging phenotypic, genotypic, weather, and image data.  Development of standardized data collection and analysis practices by working directly with the data generators in the initial stages of the data collection process, is an important first step to support a multi-institutional, multi-year breeding projects.  The Genotype by Environment (GXE) subproject within the maize Genomes to Fields (G2F) is a multi-institutional project spanning 25 North American locations.  The GXE group is collectively addressing environmental effects on the performance of a large collection of maize inbreds and hybrids grown in 25 diverse locations.  Each location is collecting data on 14 core phenotypic traits, as well as weather measurements with image data for a subset of locations.  To assist in the management of these diverse data types, we are developing and deploying a robust, yet flexible, data management and analysis platform that meets their immediate needs but is also extendable to the broader plant breeding community.  In this poster, we present progress made over the past year working with partners at the iPlant Collaborative and the Breeding Management System software development team at CIMMYT, as well as plans for next steps in 2016.