The research team of Jinha Jung, Purdue University and Zhou Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison have been awarded a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative (AG2PI) to advance research in sharing data using public cloud services from unoccupied aerial systems. Oracle for Research, led by Oracle Vice President Alison Derbenwick Miller, is supporting the project by sharing access to Oracle Cloud and technical expertise.

The project is one of 11 seed grants awarded by AG2PI to 20 institutions across the country in the second of three rounds of grant competition. Awarded grants help to address genome to phenome issues and develop solutions for research needs and identify gaps as well as sharing opportunities. Project work begins in early 2022 and will run from six to 15 months.

AG2PI is a three-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The goal of AG2PI is to connect crop and livestock scientists to each other and to those working in data science, statistics, engineering, and social sciences to identify shared problems and collaborate on solutions.

Jung, an assistant professor of civil engineering, is the lead Project Investigator for the project, “Sharing Unoccupied Aerial System (UAS) Based High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping Data via Public Cloud.” He and his research team intend to develop online material for educating how others can manage and share UAS-based data through public cloud services. They will provide tutorials on how to share geospatial data products generated from UAS for improved high throughput plant phenotyping. UAS, or drone, is a popular tool to acquire remote-sensing data such as plant stress and yield, which carries high volumes of data. The team will create guides for organizing data as well as ways to share with other researchers and the public.

The Round 2 Seed Grants span three levels of funding: emerging grants, enabling grants, and establishing grants. Award amounts range from $20,000–$75,000, depending on the grant type and associated funding level.

“The projects awarded in this round of our seed grant program help to broaden the interactions between crop and livestock science, which is necessary to find synergistic relationships,” says Patrick Schnable, AG2PI lead scientist and distinguished professor at Iowa State University. “Finding ways to work that transcend boundaries will improve the pace and methodologies for those in plant and animal research communities.”

The third round of AG2PI seed grants will be awarded in Spring 2022. Information for submitting a proposal for Round 3 is on the website; the deadline for submission is March 8. For more information on this and other grant opportunities, visit the webpage: https://www.ag2pi.org/seed-grants/.

The AG2PI is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The goal of AG2PI is to build communities that address the challenges of genome-to-phenome research across crops and livestock. The AG2PI partners include Iowa State University, University of Nebraska, University of Arizona, University of Idaho, and the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.

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Source: AG2PI