Online information platform for the management of national variety test of major crops in China: Design, development, and applications

Abstract

A crop variety test is an important way to evaluate the high yield, adaptability, and resistance of potential crop varieties, and it is the cornerstone of the commercialization of new crop varieties. In China, variety tests are performed on five major crops (rice, wheat, maize, cotton, and soybean) by national or provincial agricultural departments every year. However, a large-scale, high-throughput, widely adaptable, and low-cost information platform that supports the management of all the business processes of crop variety tests is lacking, and thus the development of the crop seed industry in China is restricted. In this study, a cloud-based online information platform called Golden Seed Variety Test Platform (GSVTP) was designed and developed for the management of the national variety test of major crops on the basis of our proposed three-tier browser/server architecture model. The platform provides many functional modules for automatic and intelligent data collection, processing, analysis, and report preparation. The platform has been fully applied to all national-level and some provincial-level variety tests on five major crops in China and has been run safely and stably for more than three years. It is by far the most widely used information platform for variety test management in China, covers all the ecological zones of China’s five major crops, and has the largest number of users. The presented platform has greatly improved the work efficiency and data quality of variety tests and reduced the workload, labor, and materials cost. The successful application of our platform has greatly improved the precision of China’s crop variety test at the management level.