What is it about?
This paper describes BETYdb, an open database of plant trait and yield data that has been used for meta-analysis and crop and ecosystem modeling. It summarizes the available data and provides examples of its use. In addition to providing open data to advance bioenergy feedstock research, BETYdb has expanded to included data on a wide range of plant and ecosystems measurements. BETYdb is the central database supporting the Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer (PEcAn, pecanproject.org) framework for crop and ecosystem modeling; it is used by the TERRA REFerence Phenotyping Platform (TERRA-REF, terraref.org) to store agronomic metadata and plant traits for the public domain high throughput phenomics dataset. The database schema was also adopted by the Global Forest Carbon database (forc-db.github.io), the largest database of ground-based measurements of forest ecosytsem carbon stocks and annual fluxes. In this paper we demonstrate the use of BETYdb to characterize biomass production of multiple potential biomass crops. A key finding is that Miscanthus is over twice as productive as Switchgrass across a wide range of environmental and management conditions.
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Why is it important?
To demonstrate the value of the data when applied to evaluate plants that can produce biomass for bioenergy, a meta-analysis shows that Miscanthus is over twice as productive as Switchgrass across a wide range of environmental and management conditions. BETYdb has also become a key component of the PEcAn project infrastructure for crop and ecosystem modeling. The BETYdb software is being used at many institutions to manage and share data across research teams.
Perspectives
BETYdb was built to support meta-analysis for ecosystem modeling. It has a nice interface that walks scientists through the steps of extracting data from the primary literature and putting it into the database. Since we originally developed the database for that purpose, we have extended the software to make it easier to import primary data. It is particularly good at storing experimental metadata in a consistent way.
David LeBauer
The University of Arizona
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: BETYdb: a yield, trait, and ecosystem service database applied to second-generation bioenergy feedstock production, GCB Bioenergy, January 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/gcbb.12420.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Open-source plant database confirms top US bioenergy crop
Scientists have confirmed that Miscanthus, long speculated to be the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass in the U.S. using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction in plant science, climate change, and ecology research.
BETYdb: Biofuel Ecophysiological Traits and Yields Database
Web interface to BETYdb
BETYdb: Data Access Documentation
This document is written for people who want to get data from BETYdb through either 1) the web browser interface search box or 2) the more powerful URL-based methods of submitting queries programmatically. These URL-based queries are the basis of the rOpensci 'traits' package that allows users to retrieve data in R.
Presentation describing the use of BETYdb to organize data
Presentation from 2014 describing BETYdb and how it is used to aggregate and analyze published data.
BETYdb source code
Source code for BETYdb.
Contributors
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