Location: Agroecosystem Management Research
Project Number: 3042-21660-001-006-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Sep 1, 2023
End Date: Dec 31, 2027
Objective:
This project will focus on the development of a standardized and integrated living agricultural research data system of systems between the University of Nebraska Eastern Nebraska Research, Extension, and Education Center (ENREEC) and USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) through ARS Partnerships for Data Innovations (PDI). These integrated solutions are to include optimized, yet customized, solutions that can be shared in a manner to meet or exceed organizational IT, cybersecurity, and data management guidelines while minimizing operational and maintenance costs. USDA ARS and UNL ENREEC are focused on developing data management solutions that ensuring agricultural research data are not lost during field experimentation, reduce data collection errors, decrease processing and QA/QC time, make data sharing with collaborators easier, improve data visualization, and increase the overall value of the data being collected. The solutions developed through this project will serve as a basis for how ARS works with other university partners.
Approach:
UNL ENREEC will work cooperatively with the USDA ARS project teams to accomplish the objectives using the following approach:
1) Take an active leadership role in completing the USDA ARS PDI Precision Ag Connector project. PDI has funded Esri to develop out an automated solution for mapping on-board collected data from agricultural equipment from various vendors to a living, standardized, and integrated data platform hosed in the USDA ARS data tier in the PDI managed commercial Azure cloud environment. It is fully expected that this solution will work with Esri software solutions and will comply with USDA IT and cybersecurity guidelines.
2) Work with the PDI team on the development of a customized version of the PDI Farm Management app for ENREEC. The ENREEC will evaluate the app and work to integrate the app into the UNL research farm managers operations. Further, ENREEC will work with the PDI team in the development of the PDI Rangeland Management app. The PDI tech team members will develop out the solutions and ENREEC will provide the base requirements and data for developing out these solutions.
3) Work directly with the PDI IoT and cloud teams on integrating ENREEC in-field research sensors into the USDA PDI commercial cloud environment. This objective includes operationalizing semi-automated QA/QC for the various IoT.
