December AgBioData Conference Call

James Wilgenbusch, Senior Associate Director of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at University of Minnesota, will be talking about the GEMs (GxExMxS) platform.  

AgBioData meetings are held online using ZOOM on December 5th at 10 AM PST, 11 AM MST, 12 PM CDT, 1 PM EST and 6 PM GMT.

Meeting Access Details

Title: Building Cyberinfrastructure for Multidisciplinary Multiscale AgroInformatics

Abstract: The field of agricultural informatics (agroinformatics) is awash in new data sources owing to advanced technologies, such as high throughput genome and transcriptome sequencing, high resolution imagery from ground-level robots to satellites, detailed environmental measurements from a growing array of sophisticated yet cost-effective sensors, plus real-time economic reporting and farmer survey data.  Taken together these data represent both the promise and the challenge of the Big Data revolution for agroinformatics. For example, a more thorough understanding of Genotype by Environmental (GxE) interactions is accelerating our efforts to increase crop yields without expanding land use, improve nutritional value in staple crops, and protect crops from biotic and abiotic stresses.  That said, GxE interactions are only part of the complex dynamic that influences our global food supply.  Interactions related to agricultural Management practices and Socio-economic conditions combined with GxE effects (collectively referred to as GxExMxS interactions), are critically important to solving challenges related to crop sustainability and food production at multiple functional, temporal and spatial scales. In this talk I will describe a novel agroinformatics data sharing and analysis platform called GEMS.  The GEMS platform is built on robust community-based software components to enable continuous improvement, and provides a framework for ingesting, cleaning, harmonizing, storing, securing and analyzing GxExMxS type data sets.  Making diverse data sets interoperable and providing a robust yet flexible framework to satisfy a wide variety of data use agreements are essential activities in our pursuit to harness the potential of Big Data in agriculture.  By focusing development on these activities, G.E.M.S is well positioned to serve as a nexus for research collaborations among NGOs, university partners, government and independent research agencies, and grower organizations.