In the last days of April 2019, NordPlant arranged a workshop on phenotyping standards with Célia Michotey and Anne-Françoise Adam-Blondon from INRA Versailles. Twenty scientists participated in the workshop, which was held in Biskopshuset, Lund. During the first day, Anne-Françoise Adam-Blondon gave an introduction to the subject of phenotyping standards and presented the MIAPPE (Minimum Information About a Plant Phenotyping Experiment) project and the CropOntology curation tool, while Célia Michotey presented the Woody Plant Ontology.
In the afternoon the participants had the opportunity to use the standards to describe a dataset that they had generated and brought to the workshop. This gave the participants a welcome chance to use the standards in practice, and provided many opportunities for discussions with the workshop leaders.
On the second day Célia Michotey and Anne-Françoise Adam-Blondon discussed a number of practical examples, with an emphasis on the advantages of using data standards. Among the examples were using local and global information systems for forest tree data management, and how standards can be used to improve data discovery.
In summary, the workshop was a good introduction to a rapidly developing topic that will be more and more important in the future, and it gave the participants both an opportunity to get an introduction to the topic and discuss their specific problems, which was much appreciated!
For more information on standards and reporting of plant phenotyping data see:
MIAPPE –Minimum Information About a Plant Phenotyping Experiment