Open source application development for phenotypical data acquisition

Abstract

The Poland Lab at Kansas State University studies the genetics of wheat ‘to develop a climate-resilient wheat variety that can combat rising heat and drought.’ With populations and food demand rising the need for accelerated food growth is imminent. A previous group of Android applications, Field book has shown that the use of open source app development could create a segue to increasing food development through modernized plant breeding across the world. This is especially useful to various countries that may have a limited budget and have a rising market for Android mobile devices. The applications described in this report include: Verify, a barcode scanning application that can quickly confirm if various seed identifiers are found within a database, Field Mapping, an application that identifies individual plot segments throughout farmland and finally, Survey, an application for manual input of latitude and longitude data. These three applications and services open a new open-source domain for acquisition of data on farmlands to accompany the research of plant breeders.