The Soil Health Partnership (SHP) is pleased to announce a partnership with the University of Minnesota GEMS platform (Genetics, Environment Management, Socio-Economics) to re-engineer SHP data flow and securely store, manage, and integrate data.
“SHP looks forward to the partnership growing each year. The first year, we are focusing on securely storing and backing up data, connecting to other major data sets, and creating a data cleaning system for SHP yield data,” said Jack Cornell, SHP Field Team Director. “The second year, we hope to focus on utilizing the data cleaning system for our yield data and creating a platform for quick staff access to data.”
GEMS is a data sharing and analytical platform that enables public-private research collaborations for innovation in food and agricultural production, and other domain areas. The GEMS platform will enable SHP to securely store data, while providing and controlling access for research partners and collaborators. Within GEMS, users have access to tools to clean data, enable data interoperability, and apply advanced analytic methods to all of the diverse types of data that SHP currently collects and manages, such as soils data, management and socio-economic data, and yield data.
“We are excited to work with GEMS as we improve how we manage, integrate, and analyze data at SHP. Taking data management and integration to the next level will build our capacity to collect and analyze data and report results back to farmers, partners, and the agricultural community,” says SHP Lead Scientist, Dr. Maria Bowman.
GEMS is jointly led by the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources Sciences (CFANS) and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) at the University of Minnesota, and the GEMS hardware and software resides in a secure data center managed by the MSI. The core platform is hosted in MSI’s local, secure, scalable cloud environment.
“The GEMS team is really looking forward to working with SHP leadership on the crucial first steps of data cleaning and tool design. If done well, we can collectively enable farmers to make meaningful farm management decisions that improve soil health and crop productivity,” commented GEMS Operations Manager, Kevin Silverstein.