A multiple species, continent-wide, million-phenotype agronomic plant dataset.

Abstract

A critical shortage of 'big' agronomic data is placing an unnecessary constraint on the conduct of public agronomic research, imparting barriers to model development and testing. Here, we address this problem by providing a large non-relational database of agronomic trials, linked to intensive management and observational data, run under a unified experimental framework. The National Variety Trials (NVTs) represent a decade-long experimental trial network, conducted across thousands of Australian field sites using highly standardised randomised controlled designs. The NVTs contain over a million machine-measured phenotypic observations, aggregated from density-controlled populations containing hundreds of millions of plants and thousands of released plant varieties. These data are linked to hundreds of thousands of metadata observations including standardised soil tests, fertiliser and pesticide input data, crop rotation data, prior farm management practices, and in-field sensors. Finally, these data are linked to a suite of ground and remote sensing observations, arranged into interpolated daily- and ten-day aggregated time series, to capture the substantial diversity in vegetation and environmental patterns across the continent-spanning NVT network.

Plant phenotyping relevance

大規模な機械測定フェノタイプデータセットの構築・提供が中心であり、植物フェノタイピング研究用データ基盤に該当する。

Code and data availability

The paper is a data descriptor for a million-phenotype agronomic dataset (Australian National Variety Trials) with associated annotated R processing code, both deposited publicly on figshare as a collection by the authors. The figshare deposit directly contains the paper's phenotype data, environmental time series, and