POSE: Phase I: An Open-Source Ecosystem for Plant Phenotyping Tools Based on Plant Computer Vision (PlantCV)

A major bottleneck in the ability to improve crops for food, fuel, and fiber is a gap in understanding of how plants change in response to the environment. Plant phenomics is a field of plant biology that aims to reduce this bottleneck by integrating imaging and computational approaches to non-destructively measure and model plant physical and physiological properties.

In general, the sustainability of computational resources developed by the community are lacking due to a lack of knowledge about sustainable software development and a lack of community building by working in isolated silos. These challenges lead to reduced impact of community contributions and inefficient allocation of resources and effort. This project addresses this community challenge with the Plant Computer Vision (PlantCV) Open-Source Ecosystem.

Plant Computer Vision (PlantCV) is an open-source image analysis package that is developed with sustainability in mind, with robust processes and infrastructure in place to support continuous development and integration, and distributed development. In this project, the team aims to 1) develop the governance and recruitment structures that will increase the sustainability of PlantCV as a foundational tool in the plant phenotyping community; and 2) recruit and train developers in the principles of sustainable open-source software development to build an open-source ecosystem around PlantCV and other key software in the community.

Contributor buy-in will be fostered by developing a governance structure that gives participants in the community a stake in the decision making of the open-source ecosystem and credit for contributions. Ultimately, this ecosystem could enable the development of annotated public datasets and open-source tools for agriculture. This project: 1) trains ecosystem participants in sustainable software development skills, which benefits both PlantCV and other tools in the plant phenotyping ecosystem; 2) trains and recruits users in the ecosystem to increase the adoption of phenomics tools; and 3) develops a community of contributors and leaders in open-source tools in phenomics that will lead future developments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.