Breeding programs require high-quality and timely data to inform the efficient production of high-yielding, climate-resistant, and nutritious crops. This is often hampered by conventional field data collection practices, which can be tedious to manage and prone to errors and losses.
To address these data challenges, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) has implemented the Enterprise Breeding System (EBS), the CGIAR-preferred breeding data management system, since 2024. A key part of the commitment is to utilize digital data collection tools to fast-track and fool-proof practices.
As field data collection is an inherently collaborative activity, a 2-day workshop for field staff and breeders was conducted to demonstrate the cross-platform integration between EBS and the Field Book mobile application on 14-15 April 2025 at IITA Headquarters in Ibadan. Simon Imoro (EBS Training Lead) highlighted that the digital data collection process preserves data quality so that it can accurately inform breeding decisions.
Breeding technicians and supervisors across the maize, soybean, and cowpea programs maximized the seamless connection powered by Breeding API (BrAPI). So far, the cowpea program has already adopted the end-to-end workflow consisting of the key steps:
syncing of experiment occurrences and traits from EBS to Field Book,
digital data capture,
syncing of collected data from Field Book to EBS,
data quality control, and
generating computed trait data.
Soon, the maize and soybeans programs will be doing the same for their 2025 season data.
To further support more crop programs, guidelines on the best practices for digital data collection using EBS and Field Book was also shared across the CGIAR network.
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