The Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) focuses on crop improvement for drought-prone and harsh environments, assisting developing-world researchers to access a broader pool of plant genetic diversity and technologies. To succeed, breeders must understand genotype–environment interactions, and identify the genetic basis and heritability of adaptive traits, which requires harnessing the increasing volume of agriculture-related information and harmonizing the terminology used across the disciplines to describe the crop phenotypes. Therefore, eight CGIAR Centers and their national partners developed the Crop Ontology (CO), which currently includes breeders’ trait descriptions for 15 crops: cassava, banana, barley, chickpea, common bean, cowpea, groundnut, maize, pearl millet, pigeon pea, potato, rice, sorghum, wheat and yam. CO is an open source of standard lists of traits, methods and scales for breeders’ fieldbooks and crop information systems like the CCAFS Global Agricultural Trials Repository and the International Cassava Database of the Cassava Next Generation Sequencing project.

Objectives

The Crop Ontology aims at supporting data interoperability and analysis across evaluation sites, phenotyping networks and facilitating the exchange of trait data between crop models. It aims to: a) enable community-based curation of reference lists of breeders’ traits, measurement methods and scales, and environmental and trial management variables; and b) harmonize annotation of breeders’ data across sources, particularly field-books and phenotype databases. The Crop Ontology project (www.cropontology.org) stimulates and mediates the discussions between breeders, data managers, geneticists, crop modelers that need to agree on common best practices to manage and share their data.