From Farm to FAIR: The Trials of Linking and Sharing Wheat Research Data

AbstractThis paper describes progress towards an integrated data framework that supports the sharing of data from the Designing Future Wheat (DFW) strategic research programme funded by the UK BBSRC. DFW is a 5 year project (https://designingfuturewheat.org.uk/) that spans eight research institutes and universities, and aims to deliver pre-breeding germplasm to breeders to improve and increase the genetic diversity of their breeding programs. DFW is committed to making its data open to the wider research community by adopting FAIR data sharing approaches. It is also a good example of a data-intensive strategic research programme which follows a cyclical Field-to-Lab-to-Field approach that is representative of much contemporary and multidisciplinary crop science research. However, even with dedicated funding to develop crop data research infrastructures within DFW, we found that there are many challenges that require pragmatic and flexible ways to enable them to interoperate. We present key DFW data resources as a case study to assess progress and discuss these challenges with a view to developing infrastructure that exposes metadata-rich datasets and that meets FAIR principles.