About

Alliance of Plant Phenotyping Software (APPS) Developers project is funded by an USDA NIFA Data Science for Food and Agricultural Systems (DSFAS) Coordinated Innovation Network (CIN) grant (grant number 2022-67021-36467). The project aims to bring together developers, creators, maintainers, and users of plant phenotyping algorithms, scripts, and software to develop a more sustainable ecosystem of tools.

Vision

The landscape of existing tools is fragmented, with many methods not available in a user-friendly form or not maintained. In general, methods are developed in silos and are not interoperable. To address this, we aim to build a Coordinated Innovation Network that will make existing phenotyping software tools more interoperable, develop tools that extract more information from existing data, and will contribute to training researchers in analysis of ‘big data’. Ultimately, this network will build an ecosystem that incentivizes software that enhances reproducible research and open publishing of code and datasets.

Mission

  1. Bring together developers of existing phenotyping software to make tools interoperable.

  2. Bring together multidisciplinary researchers to develop algorithms that will extract additional information from existing agricultural data.

  3. Integrate existing stand-alone tools/algorithms for plant phenotyping into sustainable open-source tools for the community.

  4. Establish a sustainable network of phenotyping software developers and users that promotes reproducible research and reusable and extensible software.

  5. Engage phenomics software users and developers from the public and private sector through hands-on workshops, tutorials, and network events.

Values

We value our colleagues that have developed and shared datasets, algorithms, methods, scripts, and software with the community. We value collaboration and aim to support both individual credit and accomplishment while developing an ecosystem where integration and interoperability are valued.

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