Agricultural scientists involved in the Africa Trial Sites project held a brainstorming session during the Generation Challenge Program’s (GCP) Annual Research Meeting (ARM). Some key points that came out of the session were:
- People working in crop improvement need information on regulatory issues related to exchanging germplasm for testing in multi-location trials.
- There is a strong need for training in how to characterize trial sites and use computer tools to support phenotyping
- The Africa Trial Site network needs multi-language capacity to reach farmers throughout the continent. The web site is under development in English. The next version will include a French translation. Future versions should include Portuguese and possibly other languages.
- Agricultural scientist need to know about the biotic and abiotic stresses of a particular trial site. A drought experiment may have careful control over water in the trial. But if the trial is strongly affected by pests and diseases, the results may be of little value
- Each trial site should have information on sowing dates and the crop calendar. In general, there should be more information specific to the crop.
- Project researchers should develop a minimum data set for characterizing trial sites. Many sites will lack information on climate, soil and other variables. How can we deal with this missing data?
- Many trial sites lack data on soils. This bottleneck will be difficult to overcome given the lack of resources to carry out soil analysis in many countries. Soil water holding capacity is a key variable needed for analysis of cultivar trials.
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