Location: Agroecosystem Management Research
Project Number: 3042-21660-001-001-S
Project Type: Non-Assistance Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Aug 1, 2023
End Date: Dec 31, 2027
Objective:
Implementing successful climate resilient and mitigation strategies requires data driven, and science/evidence-based tools and approaches that are inclusive, adaptable, scalable, and accessible to researchers, managers, and stakeholders. Data management, automation, standardization, integration, access, sharing, discovery, visualization, and product innovations are important for food, agriculture, forestry, environment and climate security, societal stability, and policy design, at local, national, and global scales. These data innovations must be standardized, integrated, and interoperable across organizational boundaries with the goal of developing global living agricultural research platforms that are designed put as much data as possible, in a user friendly form, at the fingertips of researchers to decrease the time that they are currently spending on compiling, organizing, and manipulating data, so that they can spend more time on their discipline specific research.
Approach:
This University of Nebraska Lincoln team will actively contribute to the national ARS Partnerships for Data Innovations (PDI) and the National Measurement and Monitoring Innovations for Environmental and Sustainable Agricultural Systems project to develop global living agricultural research platforms. Real-time scientific observational and continuous monitoring data will be streaming into these environments, so trust and permission controls are essential in assuring contributing researchers that they have control over their non-published data. Once a contributing researcher is ready to share their data with a larger research community or to the public, these platforms should provide this expanded sharing functionality in a user-friendly manner. The development of these sustainable and resilient integrated data architectures are based on the FAIR principles and USDA IT and cybersecurity guidelines and rules, that include automation of data flow from field or laboratory to cloud and/or supercomputing centers that have a USDA approved Authority to Operate for storage, sharing, QA/QC, visualization, analysis, and for use with added-value data products. We will foster national/global research partnerships around co-development and adoption of affordable, standardized, integrated, inclusive, and scalable data platforms, tools, and solutions that integrate local datasets with national/global datasets for use with cutting-edge technologies (i.e., process-based modeling, AI/machine learning). These platforms and tools are primarily for helping researchers in their day-to-day research activities, but also these platforms and tools should also help our agricultural farmers, ranchers, and processors to effectively visualize potential benefits and trade-offs of new technologies or management practices and to help with decision making processes. Additionally, we will provide support to ARS in areas including the development and adoption of low-cost sensor, UAS, and connectivity technologies with other collaborating institutions.
