ABR-PG Standards and CyberInfrastructure that Enable "Big-Data" Driven Discovery for Tree Crop Research

The FHREC is comprised of biological and social science components focused on critical forest health and restoration issues. The biological research component concentrates on discovering the various genetic/physiologic mechanisms of resistances to biotic and abiotic stressors and developing methods to exploit this information for tree improvement and forest management. The social science research component explores and defines the factors that significantly influence adoption of new technologies in forest management practices, including restoration and reclamation and the integration of the public directly into stewardship of our tree resources. In this regard, we are proposing an outreach educational opportunity to directly involve the public into research data gathering, packaging and uploading into Tripal tree modules for direct research analyses and application. For this purpose, the FHREC will provide participatory research and data integration opportunities to various users including forest and fruit tree owners and managers via direct interactions with the bioinformatics PI, co-PIs and developers and workshops. The bioinformatics tools will be developed for tree and site inventories in a tree improvement and species conservation framework. The tools will be optimized for interoperability with the Tripal databases and mobile communications, providing wide flexibility and high connectivity to all potential users. An on-campus workshop will be provided in year 2 for the project collaborators and a set of users identified in year 1. Workshop participants will learn critical needs for tree site evaluation, how to take and describe field metrics, forest stand metrics, tree phenotyping and upload data to the database. In the field, workshops will be provided in year 3. These workshops will be held in optimal field locations for participants and researchers obtain hands on training in the principles and practices provided in the on campus workshop of the prior year. Subsequently researchers will be dispatched to individual users’ sites for data collection monitoring and evaluation as requested and permitted by available funds. By year 3 the integrative and mobile tools will be available through the Tripal databases as well as the FHREC web portal.