Agriculture · food security

FAIR-data and attribution standards for agricultural research

Agricultural and food-security research — across CGIAR centres, national agricultural institutes, and university faculties — generates large volumes of field, crop, genebank, and germplasm data that must be findable and reusable to support global food security. The sector relies on FAIR data principles, AGROVOC for controlled vocabulary, DataCite DOIs for datasets, and increasingly on contributor and project identifiers. CASRAI offers the shared vocabulary that connects these data records to the people and projects that produce them.

CGIAR centres, national institutes, and universities worldwide

What this sector cares about

Key research-administration concerns

FAIR data publishing for crop, field, and genebank datasets
AGROVOC-based subject indexing for agricultural data interoperability
Germplasm and genebank data standards and persistent identifiers
DataCite DOIs and citation for datasets and software
Contributor attribution (CRediT) across multi-partner field trials
Open-access and data-sharing mandates from agricultural funders

Agricultural and food-security research relies on shared multilingual vocabularies such as the FAO's AGROVOC thesaurus to make crop, genebank, and germplasm data findable — the same FAIR-data instinct CASRAI applies to contribution and project records, extending into nutrition research database structures like the body metrics tracking and dietary guidelines from Dietitian Without Borders and the metabolic indices compiled by Daily Health Keeper.

Standards in play