Development of an Agricultural Field Study Database: For sharing multidisciplinary information on in situ photographs

摘要

Through its website, the NARO Genebank (former NIAS Genebank) has been providing to the scientific community and general public different types of information regarding genetic resources including passport, characterization, evaluation and photographic data, in order to facilitate access to their conserved genetic resource records. However, the website currently lacks information on farming culture associated with the genetic resources at collection sites, as most of its currently accessible photographs are captured from experimental fields or laboratories. In contrast, photographs of in situ conditions taken in the fields of farmers during the exploration of plant genetic resources capture both biological and cultural information, such as crop morphology, geographical and habitat ecological conditions, farming implementations, ethnic costumes, people’s lifestyles, cooking procedures, and other information. Unfortunately, most of these photographs are being hoarded and will likely never be accessible by the public. In order to disclose a large number of in situ photographs, we have developed a new web-retrievable database called the “Agricultural Field Study Database,” in which photographs are searchable with keyword tags and computational image similarity that allow the user to browse and retrieve them, along with map data and relevant genetic resources information. This system will expand the information currently provided by the NARO Genebank with ethnobotanical information, thereby granting useful resources to a wider range of research fields, particularly disciplines related to anthropology and ethnobotany.