New Video Tutorials Published on YouTube for TERRA REF Data Use

Kristina has begun publishing new videos on the TERRA REF YouTube channel that demonstrate how to access and use some key TERRA REF datasets.

TERRA REF is an ARPA-E-funded project to create and deploy many sensors to collect data on crop plants at high resolution. These data include publicly available images of plants, measurements of various traits, and genetic data, are publicly available.

Because of the diversity and size of the data collected by TERRA REF as well as the number of different databases and ways to access it, it can be challenging to find a specific data set. We want to enable users to access, get, and use the data of interest, so we have been developing a set of tutorials that show users how to access and analyze TERRA REF data. Funding from the Midwest Big Data Hub supported presentation of online webinars and videos to accompany these tutorials. The proposal and our final report is linked below.

Kristina presented four hour long walkthroughs that demonstrated how to access and use various types of TERRA REF data. We collected information on attendees’ needs, technical ability levels, and change in knowledge about using the data by asking users to take a survey both before and after each walkthrough. We used this feedback to improve our tutorials. Finally, we used recordings of the walkthroughs to publish small instructional units as YouTube videos so this information is broadly and publicly accessible.

These tutorials cover accessing and using trait data, weather data, and image data, and an introduction to getting TERRA REF data via the Breeding API. Across the four hour-long walkthroughs, there were 52 attendees.

Participant surveys demonstrated that the walkthroughs were successful at teaching attendees how to find and use various types of TERRA REF data - this can be seen in the figure below by the fact that the black portion of the bars increase between the Before to After surveys.