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ARS Home » Southeast Area » Fayetteville, Arkansas » Poultry Production and Product Safety Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #400604

Research Project: Developing Best Management Practices for Poultry Litter to Improve Agronomic Value and Reduce Air, Soil and Water Pollution

Location: Poultry Production and Product Safety Research

Title: Forage Data Hub – A platform for sharing valuable datasets for resilience

Author
item Ashworth, Amanda
item MARSHALL, LOGAN - University Of Texas At Arlington
item VOLENEC, JEFF - Purdue University
item BERTI, MARISOL - North Dakota State University
item VAN SANTEN, EDZARD - University Of Florida
item WILLIAMS, CAROL - University Of Wisconsin
item Gopakumar, Vinayak
item FOSTER, JAMIE - Texas A&M Agrilife
item SU, JIANHONG - University Of Texas At Arlington
item PICASSO, VALENTIN - University Of Wisconsin

Submitted to: International Grasslands Congress
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 12/17/2022
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: In accord with the necessity to enhance ecosystem service and productivity in food systems, is the increase of data availability at multiple scales and over time. To help meet this need, we discuss the development of a National Forage Data Hub which will act as a platform to save, share, and analyze data pertaining to forage systems. This centralized hub will capitalize on existing data sources by bridging multiple sources including forage crop—soil, water, and nutrient availability—yield (animal and crop) potential (and gaps)—climate—management systems spatially and temporally for system interaction assessments through next-generation analytics. This novel approach to existing datasets will integrate Big Data at the soil-water-plant-animal-climate nexus to advance data storage technology systems for multiple trophic-level research projects. The concurrence of the findings from the informal analysis conducted in this paper with results from other research articles lends itself in favor of the longer-term success of the Forage Data Hub and similar central data repository systems. Beyond being used for formal research, such systems, if properly maintained, may be able serve as data sources to inform any number of agronomic decisions. Commercial producers, independent producers, and the Earth’s ecosystem alike, all stand to benefit from wider agronomic data availability. Future plans include the development of a web-based system for submitting, accessing, and visualizing data, as well as further automation of data management and integration of a greater variety of data (e.g. climate data, soil data) into the hub. As these plans are realized and data continues to accumulate, so too will the potential to harness the immense capabilities of modern data science in favor of the field of agriculture.