I work at the University of Bonn as the head of a junior research group in the DFG Cluster of Excellence PhenoRob and am involved in field trials on, among other things, mixtures, resource efficiency and ecosystem services. I am also involved in the Dikopshof continuous fertilization trial. In this respect, I have links to use case 1 of FAIRagro. We are also involved in BonaRes and upload data in the repository. Furthermore, I am involved in non-invasive phenotyping and e.g. ground truthing of drone data. This is related to use case 5 of FAIRagro. Based on data published in BonaRes and similar data bases I model plant growth with mathematical process-based simulation models. For the modeling of plant growth I need curated field data sets, raw data are of little use in this context. Collecting and preparing these myself costs time and money. Therefore, I like to reuse data that is already collected and curated. In order to be able to reuse other people’s data sets, I ask my colleagues, either face-by-face or by e-mail. I receive datasets by email or via the university’s cloud. I also share my own data from field trials with colleagues. The problem is the high effort for the preparation: everyone works with their own structure for a tabular documentation in Excel. It takes a long time to merge these, to make arrangements, etc. This effort is often only made when a text publication is due, for which I need the data. To improve this process I would like to have a content-structured database that everyone uses from the beginning. Then there would be no more time-consuming merging afterwards for the modelers. Here I see a starting point for FAIRagro in my use case. To make it as easy as possible for the researchers, Excel (or a free alternative) should be used, since everyone uses this. Some students prefer to use open programs like Libre Office. Also, it would be helpful for us to have an automatic check routine for quality checking raw data, for example to find outliers. Here FAIRagro could also support. Overall, I can imagine contributing my use case to a call from FAIRagro to get money for harmonizing data collection and data preparation. At least a student assistant would already be very supportive here.
Dr. Sabine Seidel (Uni Bonn)
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