Data management for facilitating better crop breeding decisions

Participants at the breeding management system and data archiving training organized under TL III. Photo: ICRISAT

Training sessions on how to create field books, manage nurseries and archive data using the breeding management system (BMS) were conducted for technicians from Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia as part of the Tropical Legumes III (TL III) project activities.

The training focused on five major areas –

Use of BMS: Importance of data management and use of BMS as a tool.

Germplasm management:  Searching and creating a germplasm list.

Trial field management: Creating trial field book, field map, field scorer, exporting trial book for data collection and importing trial data.

Nursery management: Creating nursery book, developing crosses, generating unique barcodes, exporting nursery book from BMS, collecting and importing nursery observation data.

Data collection: Use of handheld devices for recording data.

Urging participants to use the BMS, Dr David Bergvinson, Director General, ICRISAT, said, “Having been in your situation 20 years ago, I know data archiving is difficult, but what I can assure you after two or three seasons is that you will start seeing the benefit.”

Dr Moses Siambi, Research Program Director – Eastern & Southern Africa and Country Representative, Kenya, ICRISAT, emphasized on technicians being equipped to carry out preliminary analysis of data along with efficient collection of data. “You will be the master trainers, who will train colleagues at their workstations,” he said.

“BMS minimizes errors generated when analyzing data and hence we need to embrace it,” said Dr Chris Ojiewo, Theme Leader – Seed Systems & Project Coordinator – TL III, Genetic Gains Program.

The training held from 3-7 July at Nairobi, Kenya, had 18 participants and was facilitated by Dr Abhishek Rathore, Mr Anil Kumar and Mr Praveen Reddy from the Statistics, Bio-Informatics & Data Management theme, ICRISAT.

This work contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goal