EMPHASIS-PREP Deliverable 2.5: Report on current and future user demands
Creators: name: Janni, Michela
name: Moscatelli, Silvana
name: Loreto, Francesco
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: Plant Phenotyping, Plant phenomics, Research Infrastructure, European research infrastructure

description: <strong>Executive Summary</strong> <br> <strong>Objectives:</strong> The improvement of crop performance to address the challenges imposed by climate change and in<br> view of a continuous increases of the world population (and its needs for wellbeing and healthy diet),<br> is a major goal to establish a sustainable agriculture.<br> In this scenario phenotyping is at the forefront of future plant breeding and selection, and the plant<br> phenotyping community must confront with the need to accurately measure diverse traits of an<br> increasingly large number of plants (and genotypes or ecotypes) to successfully address novel<br> challenges beside a sheer rise of plant productivity, such as increasing plants adaptability to resourcelimiting<br> environments and resilience to stress, and successful implementation of low-input agriculture<br> with selected and appropriate plants. <br> Technological advancement is the basis to foster the development of phenotyping centres, while data<br> standardization, acquisition and reusability must be considered as major objectives. Thus, future<br> trends in the development of plant phenotyping need the integration of different experts and<br> disciplines (spanning biological sciences, computer science, mathematics and engineering) with a<br> multidisciplinary view trying to identify a common language, and pipelines to endure a fruitful<br> collaboration between technology developers, providers of infrastructures and increasingly different<br> categories of users. <br> This deliverable gives a snapshot on current EMPHASIS activities, users and stakeholders, and maps<br> existing and future demands of plant phenotyping in order to meet the user expectations towards<br> plant phenotyping infrastructures in a long-term view, facilitating science- and technology-based<br> strategy developments and policies. <br> <strong>Rationale:</strong> Exploring the user and stakeholder demands is a continues and evolving process that is fundamental<br> for the long-term sustainability of EMPHASIS as a distributed infrastructure.<br> The user demands presented in this deliverable is the result of data acquisition implemented by<br> EMPHASIS-Prep through two surveys launched in 2017 and 2018 to explore the phenotyping community<br> as a whole.<br> The data of the surveys were combined with bibliographic sources, by means of a bibliographic<br> analysis to measure the phenotyping scientific production, research and trends, and that was taken<br> into account to draw the current and future user demands.<br> The future demand for plant phenotyping also considered the burning necessity to efficiently<br> integrate the different communities involved in plant phenotyping, here defined as plant phenotyping<br> integration process. <strong>Main results: </strong>To define the current and future user demands, we identified the EMPHASIS users, and mapped the<br> demand accordingly to the following categorization: Demand for phenotyping in general; Demand for access to infrastructures and data; Demand for innovation; Demand for training; Demand for modelling. From this analysis it emerges: 1) an increasing demand for training, especially keyed at training<br> for imaging and bioinformatics; 2) an increased demand for access the phenotyping<br> infrastructures 3) the need of a even wider and more integrated community to address<br> phenotyping challenges and foster complementation across different disciplines.