FAO.org

Context

The widespread use of higher-yielding and stress-resistant crop varieties throughout Africa has been hindered by the variability of African growing conditions and the difficulty of selecting appropriate sites and growing environments to test new cultivars. Innovations may be tested, but they are often not tested in ways that will increase the likelihood that they will be useful to farmers, which means the seeds are not adopted. 

Methodology

To address this, the Africa Trial Sites (ATS) portal has been established to enable national and international research organizations to pool their extensive information on trial sites electronically. ATS also provides numerous tools that are based on advances in bioinformatics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and data management to help farmers, plant breeders, and agronomists evaluate new varieties in the field more efficiently. For some time, much of the data from field trials – representing an enormous investment of research resources over several decades – resided on the shelves of research institutions and was difficult to assemble, analyse on a large scale, and put to use. Now, users can search the ATS portal to access data on trial sites by country; design trials to evaluate cultivars; obtain tools to manage trials (e.g. developing a budget, estimating water stress during the growing season); analyse trial data; view results of spatial analyses; examine data on an interactive Google map; and report results online. They can also rank crop varieties and add comments about their performance at a given site. The ATS portal allows for the analysis of climate data for any point in Africa and climate similarity comparisons between trial sites and other African areas. The portal also includes links to useful resources, such as the websites of participating centres, from whose breeders and genebank curators anyone can request seed supplies. The combination of African trial site data and interactive data analysis tools has made valuable information widely available to the agricultural research, development, and extension community. 

Outcomes

As results for cultivars tested in Africa have not been readily available online until now, participants’ data is significantly expanding the knowledge of particular cultivars that are suited to specific environments – especially those environments subject to stress from disease, pests, or environmental factors, including climate change. International agricultural research centres are beginning to use the portal to standardize their trial site information for a climate research programme, drawing in national partners, and they are using afristat.opendataforafrica.org to standardize their trial site information.

Source: World Bank, 2011