BioDT Hackathon: Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) - Second End-Users Workshop

A transformative three-day hackathon titled Harnessing Digital Twinning for Sustainable Agriculture: Predictive Characterisation and Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives, takes place from January 23rd to 25th, 2024 in Oslo, Norway. The event, promises to unravel the immense potential of digital twinning in revolutionizing global agricultural practices.

Harnessing Digital Twinning for Sustainable Agriculture: Predictive Characterisation and Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives

The rapid growth of the human population presents significant challenges for global agricultural production, exacerbated by the impacts of climate change. To achieve the ambitious targets set by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and address the critical issue of global food insecurity, it is imperative to enhance food production. This necessitates the development of crops with higher yields, improved nutritional values, and enhanced resilience against diseases and changing environments. To this end, there exist untapped genetic resources within crop wild relatives which may prove pivotal in securing sufficient yields and resilience in current production systems.

Throughout this 3 day workshop, we will explore the transformative potential of digital twinning, a promising technology for the model-based identification and utilization of genetic resources. By facilitating data flow and fusion from distributed sources, dynamic model updating, automated model uncertainty analysis, and the provision of alerts for new genetic resources with desired traits, digital twinning offers a powerful tool for plant breeders, conservation scientists, and policymakers.

Such digital twinning for crop wild relative identification, management, and conservation is currently being explored through the BioDT project. Within the efforts of BioDT, we have established a suite of data streams and digital twin approaches which this workshop will disseminate to users of these approaches and outputs. In addition, we invite participants to contribute to a focused effort in generating a comprehensive toolbox for crop wild relative characterization. To ensure maximal usefulness and applicability of this workshop, we will organize the program around two key sessions:

Session 1: Building a Toolbox for Predictive Characterisation of Genetic Resources

In this session, we will delve into the development of a comprehensive toolbox that enables the predictive characterization of plant genetic resources. Through newly developed and pre-existing modeling techniques and data integration from diverse sources, we will explore how to identify and leverage the genetic potential of crop wild relatives.

Session 2: Conservation of Genetic Diversity of Crop Wild Relatives 

This session will focus on novel data products of digital twinning exercises to establish the overlap between pre-established protected areas to verified distributions of crop wild relatives in need of conservation. This tool will identify and propose prioritized genetic reserves for conservation and genetic monitoring of designated CWR conservation populations.

Join us at this workshop from 23 to 25 January 2023 to explore the exciting possibilities of digital twinning in the realm of sustainable agriculture, predictive characterization of genetic resources, and conservation of crop wild relatives. Engage in insightful discussions and contribute to the collective effort of building a more resilient and nourishing future for our planet

Register here