Merging Data Across Continents and Scales with the Plant Phenology Ontology

Plant phenology — the timing of plant life-cycle events, such as flowering or leafing-out — has cascading effects on multiple levels of biological organization, from individuals to ecosystems, and is crucial for understanding the links between climate and biological communities. Plant phenology data are collected and used by many different types of researchers, from plant breeders to ecosystem ecologists. Today, thanks to data digitization and aggregation initiatives, phenology monitoring networks, and the efforts of citizen scientists, more phenologically relevant data is available than ever before. Unfortunately, combining these data in large-scale analyses remains prohibitively difficult, mostly because the individuals and organizations producing the data are using non-standardized terminologies and metrics during data collection and processing. Lack of standardization remains particularly problematic for historical datasets, which are crucial for time-based analyses. Furthermore, phenology data are often recorded as a type of trait, such as whether or not young leaves or flowers are present on a plant, making it difficult to associate the data to development stage terms in ontologies like the Plant Ontology (PO). The Plant Phenology Ontology (PPO) is a collaborative effort to help solve these problems by developing the standardized terminology, definitions, and relations that are needed for large-scale data integration. The PPO builds on the widely used PO and Phenotype and Trait Ontology (PATO) to promote broad reuse of phenological data. This talk will provide an overview of the PPO, including the history of how it came to be, design patterns used in the ontology, examples of annotating real phenological data, and plans for future development.