Empowering Plant Phenomics: Leveraging EOSC Services for Enhanced Data Security and Collaboration

The European Infrastructure for Multi-scale Plant Phenomics and Simulation (EMPHASIS) is a distributed research infrastructure with the aim of developing and providing access to facilities and services addressing multi-scale plant phenotyping in different agro-climatic scenarios. EMPHASIS addresses the technological and organizational limits of European phenotyping, for a full exploitation of genetic and genomic resources available for crop improvement in changing climate.

However, among the services available through the infrastructure, the data services need to be improved. There is a need to build a federated and interoperable e-infrastructure that allows researchers to share and analyse phenotyping data. 
In recent years, in fact, technological progress has been made in plant phenomics, and high-throughput plant phenotyping platforms now produce massive datasets involving millions of plant images concerning hundreds of different genotypes at different phenological stages in 
both field and controlled environments. 
Networks of sensors also measure environmental conditions in real time. The ongoing robotisation of experimental processes foreshadows an explosion in the volume and complexity of the data produced by the different research facilities.