AIMS

AgTrials : the Global Agriculture Trial Repository & Database : Share, Acquire & Explore data(sets)

AgTrials.org is an information portal developed (in 2012) by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), in collaboration with a number of national and international partners including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID.  

The AgTrials initiative builds on decades of evaluation trials, mostly of varieties, and includes any agricultural technology for world farmers at sites across the developing world. 

AgTrials.org is the only multi-crop platform for freely archiving, organizing, and enabling access to crop trial data ( (including those for maize, soybean, rice, and other key food and commodity crops) from around the world.

 

BACKGROUND

Although (every day around the world) there are thousands and thousands of agricultural trials taking place, much of the information on trial sites is not publically available, and indeed large volumes of historic trials data are likely lost due to poor Data Management.

Besides, withholding public data could hold back the scientific advancements we desperately need. This means, that gaps remain and there is an urgent need to design and test new institutional arrangements, and to improve the dissemination performance on data sharing to push informatioon/knowledge on agricultural trials.

As a multi site agricultural trial database and file repository for climate change analysis, AgTrials.org aims to develop an agricultural technology evaluation database for climate change analysis. Visit AgTrials.org and : 

  • Learn how information on the performance of Agricultural Technology Collection can be compiled and stored,
  • Search, organize, up- & download raw data and their associated metadata from more than 35,000 trials carried out in the last three decades and covering more than 20 countries across Africa, South Asia and Latin America, as well as 16 crops and 7 livestock species. 

AgTrials has dynamic links to the databases of CGIAR’s Crop Ontology initiative, and Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP).

BENEFITS OF USE OF THE AGTRIALS

As budgets are stretched and stretched again, research organizations need to use funds as efficiently as possible. By helping avoid duplication, and enabling scientists to select promising sites, AgTrials can potentially save them them a lot of money.

As well as the time saved by avoiding the repetition of trials, we should need little reminding that we’re edging ever closer to 2030, the deadline for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and that projections for climate change, food production and population growth require robust action today.

And in addition, resources like AgTrials could really come of age in an era of Big Data !

FUTURE OF AGTRIALS 

AgTrials is going to further:

  • Facilitate the subsequent analysis on the performance of agricultural technologies under a changing climate and 
  • Form the basis for improving models of agricultural production under current and future conditions, and for evaluating the efficacy of trialed materials for adaptation...

Future opportunities for expanding the reach of AgTrials includes linking to gene bank data sets held by GENESYS. In addition, many breeders in CGIAR use tools developed by the Integrated Breeding Platform, which could link to AgTrials to make breeding information interoperable with trial results.

CONTRIBUTE  TO AGTRIALS !

If AgTrials reaches its potential of 500,000-or-more trials, it would become a globally important recognized resource.

It could become the central register that the world’s scientists need ... But in order for it to reach its full potential, AgTrials needs more data !

"Sharing is caring – especially when it comes to agricultural data" (by Glenn Hyman |CIAT Blog | Oct 10, 2017)

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