Shared protocols and data template in agronomic trials

Due to the overlap of many disciplines and the availability of novel technologies, modern agriculture has become a wide, interdisciplinary endeavor, especially in Precision Agriculture. The adoption of a standard format for reporting field experiments can help researchers to focus on the data rather than on re-formatting and understanding the structure of the data. This paper describes how a European consortium plans to: i) create a “handbook” of protocols for reporting definitions, methodologies and Parameters measured/calculated; and ii) how a data-template for field data was created and will be linked to the “handbook”. The overall goal of the EU-funded project Solutions for Solutions for improving Agroecosystem and Crop Efficiency for water and nutrient use (SolACE) is to help European agriculture face major challenges, such as increased rainfall variability and reduced use of N and P fertilizers in order to satisfy both economic and ecological goals. The “Handbook of Protocols” and the “Data Template” have been created to achieve a flexible, standard, and clear documentation linked with the data itself to facilitate interchange of data among project’s partners and any statistical analysis and modelling of different datasets.