Agro 7
Jacque Waiden
agro - a formation of compound words meaning field, soil, crop.
Really good coffee to us means coffee that is grown sustainably, harvested properly, and procured fairly and respectfully. Coffee that highlights the diversity, rich culture and hard work from the farmers we work with.
An ontology is a formal representation of a disciplinary domain, representing a semantic standard that can be employed to annotate data where key concepts are defined, as well as the relationships that exist between those concepts (Gruber, 2009). Ontologies provide a common language for different kinds of data to be easily interpretable and interoperable allowing easier aggregation and analysis.
The Agronomy Ontology (AgrO) provides terms from the agronomy domain that are semantically organized and can facilitate the collection, storage and use of agronomic data, enabling easy interpretation and reuse of the data by humans and machines alike.
To fully understand the implications of varying practices within cropping systems and derive insights, it is often necessary to pull together information from data in different disciplinary domains. For example, data on field management, soil, weather and crop phenotypes may need to be aggregated to assess performance of particular crop under different management interventions.
However, agronomic data are often collected, described, and stored in inconsistent ways, impeding data comparison, mining, interpretation reuse. The use of standards for metadata and data annotation play a key role in addressing these challenges. While the CG Core Metadata Schema provides a metadata standard to describe agricultural datasets, the Agronomy Ontology enables the description of agronomic data variables using standard terms.
AgrO is being built from traits and parameters identified by agronomists, the ICASA Data Dictionary, and other existing ontologies such as the Environment Ontology, the Unit Ontology, and the Phenotype and Trait Ontology and enriched with the support of several scientists who bring their domain knowledge.
A key use case for AgrO is the Agronomy Field Information Management System (AgroFIMS). AgroFIMS enables digital collection of agronomic data that is semantically described a priori with agronomic terms from AgrO.
It consists of a web application used to design data collection templates for agricultural experiments by selecting variables annotated with AgrO and other relevant ontologies. These variables are sorted into a series of modules representing the typical cycle of operations in agronomic trial management, such as land preparation, irrigation, weeding, soil fertility, weather and soil parameters, and more. The field book application allows the creation of data collection sheets enabling standardization in data collection and description and linkages with breeding and other related data. In addition, AgroFIMS promotes digital collection of data to reduce error and ease data collection via the mobile apps: KDSMart, ODK, and Field Book.
AgrO is being used by the University of Florida (UF), and researchers associated with the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) and IFPRI as a standard reference terminology to enable the generation and reuse of model-ready data.
The goal of this effort is to facilitate data queries in GARDIAN that include a measure of the appropriateness of each dataset for use in quantitative analyses. Each dataset will include metadata that fully describe the terminology used in that dataset with links to AgrO definitions and units.
The mission of the OBO Foundry is to develop a family of interoperable ontologies that are both logically well-formed and scientifically accurate. Therefore, some terms in the AgrO ontology tree are generic, but necessarily so for AgrO to be interoperable with other ontologies. In further efforts towards such interoperability, AgrO reuses and builds on existing terms from other ontologies, thus minimizing term proliferation and duplication across multiple ontologies (c.f. table). This means that some terms in the AgrO ontology tree may be generic, but this is necessary for AgrO to be interoperable with other ontologies.
The ontology has been categorized in different classes, following the backbone of the OBO foundry ontologies. Below are the details of the hierarchy of the main AgrO classes to help you navigate the ontology tree.
CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture advocates open data for agricultural research for development. It considers that opening up research data for scrutiny and reuse confers significant benefits to society.
As an integral component of its advocacy for open data, the Platform promotes responsible data management through the entire research data lifecycle from planning, collecting, storing, disclosing or publishing, transferring, discovery and archiving.
Ensure PII is stored securely to protect privacy, through organizational or project specific safeguards to prevent unauthorized access, accidental disclosure or breach of data (physical & technical)
The Specialty & Agro Chemicals America event is a forum that promotes chemical manufacturing, chemical technologies, and related chemical industry services that have specific applications for the agrochemical and specialty chemical markets.
Biological and agronomic principles applied to production and management of major feed and forage crops of the northeastern United States. This includes an overview of agronomy in the world and the United States with emphasis in the Northeast region of the country, and downscales to practical aspects such as crop identification, crop physiology, soil water management, tillage and all the interactions that make farming such a complex enterprise for farm operators and society at large. The course spans over many subjects: crop, soil, nutrient, pathogen, insect, and weed management, and emphasizes managing both profitability and environmental integrity.
Study of the relation of plants to their environment and the physiology of crop plant growth. AGRO 410 Physiology of Agricultural Crops (4) AGRO 410 is a course in plant physiology that presents fundamental aspects of plant metabolism and demonstrates how they are affected by environmental conditions such as light, water availability, temperature, and mineral nutrition. It describes how plants use photosynthesis to accumulate and partition biomass and how this contributes to crop productivity. The roles of abiotic stress such as drought and temperature extremes on crop productivity also are discussed. The course objectives are to 1] learn how plants "work" at the molecular, cellular, whole plant and population levels; 2] develop critical thinking skills by planning and conducting experiments related to the course topics and reviewing journal articles; and 3] develop and enhance communication skills through a variety of writing assignments. This course is appropriate for upper level undergraduates or beginning graduate students with interest in plant and agricultural science disciplines including, horticulture, agroecology, plant pathology, ecology, meteorology and entomology; and meshes with courses in these areas. Students will be evaluated by examinations/quizzes, writing assignments and class participation. The course is offered annually and the optimal enrollment is 20 students.
The study of weeds and their management is a challenging and demanding task that requires diverse abilities. The term weed is an anthropocentric construct meaning it is a human colored definition. We will study the biology and ecology of weedy plants drawing on examples from a wide range of plant systems; those systems include agricultural fields (agronomic and horticultural crops) and forests. Of course our knowledge of the biology and ecology of weedy plant populations will then be used to underpin and assess control tactics and their integration. The discipline has a history of equating management with herbicidal control and in fact some 80% of the pesticides used in U.S. agriculture are herbicides. However through novel farmer designed management systems, through a research community focused on alternative methods of management and through increased focus on invasive species, exciting breakthroughs are occurring in alternative methods of management and prevention. This course seeks to introduce you to the breadth of management approaches in use and under study. The specific objectives are for students to describe and identify: 1) the local weed flora, 2) the fundamental aspects of weed biology and ecology relevant to managed landscapes, 3) the control methods used in managing weed populations, 4) how control measures can be integrated to accomplish acceptable levels of pest suppression, 5) operationalizing a weed management plan, 6) how herbicides enter and move to their site of action in plants, 7) classifying herbicides by their site of action, and 8) the distinction between herbicide concentration in soils and plant available herbicide concentration.
This course provides a comprehensive overview and current status of plant biotech research. The course provides knowledge of plant systems that fall in the category of GMOs. BIOTC 460 / AGRO 460 Advances and Applications of Plant Biotechnology (3)This course will provide a comprehensive overview and status of current plant biotech research. The focus is on providing knowledge of the biology of plant systems. Consequences of development of a transgenic plant either for food (crops) or as a tool to understand molecular, genetic, and inheritance mechanisms of a trait will be discussed in detail. The course will deliver the current literature and understanding of mechanisms involved in herbicide resistance in transgenic plants. Specific topics that will be of interest to students from various disciplines include disease and insect resistance, quality traits, and secondary metabolites. Molecular biology of different pollination systems will be examined so that students will understand the concept of gene flow from transgenic to non-transgenic crops. Examples from recent developments on the beneficial use of transgenic plants as producers of modified compounds, starches, antibodies and their use in phytoremediation of toxic and organic pollutants will be discussed from the perspective of genetic and molecular plant systems. Gene expression of transgenic plant traits and the stability of an engineered crop will be discussed. Specific emphasis will be on different modes of inheritance that a transgenic plant can follow after its development and release into the environment. The course also prepares students for understanding the regulatory processes that are required for testing, moving, and environment release of transgenic crops. The laboratory component of the course will introduce students to the common technique of molecular biology that are used to detect expression in transgenic plants. Transgenic maize plants will be grown in a greenhouse and analyzed for expression of introduced genes.
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