Tracking plant-pest interactions

In innovative data-intensive approaches to biology, the perspective on data and their participation in theory-making has transformed, data acquired their own value beyond the experimental context which produced them. Collecting, visualising, mobilising, and integrating them became a valuable activity by itself, that can contribute to scientific discovery. Thanks to new computational technologies for producing, disseminating, and analysing data, scientists now have access to unprecedented amounts of data, including data they did not produce themselves.

Within this framework, we want to investigate several aspects concerning data-intensive methods and their impact on plant science research. We ground our reflections on a collaboration with the Haly_Id project in Northern Italy, whose goal is to generate and deploy a high volume of data collected through remote sensing in the field as well as laboratory analysis to limit the damage inflicted by Halyomorpha halys to fruit production.

Halyomorpha halys damage

We intend to explore:

  • The role that data collection technologies play in determining what model systems are developed and used in specific plant science projects, and in turn how the diverse ways biological objects are treated —i.e., model systems in the laboratory or the field— shape the technologies developed to generate relevant data.
  • The distribution of such data collection technologies and the journey they undertake to become global and get reutilized, as well as the kind of data and communities that stem from using and sharing such technologies: e.g., data communities.

Back to Subprojects