ADAPT Core for Clean Plant Center Data Management

Over the last several years, National Clean Plant Network Centers and crop committees have discussed the need for better tools to manage the data behind virus testing and plant management. NCPN Centers vary greatly in size and scope and currently there is not a standardized data management approach across NCPN member Centers. Frequently testing and collection records are kept in Excel spreadsheets, but spreadsheets are not efficient and are limited in the ability to link data between plants, testing results and customer samples.

As a result many Centers have been looking for a better system to support quality management efforts and efficient operations. Foundation Plant Services (FPS) has spent over 10 years building and using an in-house-developed tool for advanced disease and plant testing named “ADAPT”. In FY25, beginning September 1^st, NCPN is supporting a pilot project to leverage the experience of the FPS IT team translating the ADAPT tools to be available to multiple NCPN Centers. This project, “ADAPT Core”, aims to provide Centers with a standardized, interoperable digital system to ensure efficiency, traceability, and quality of all data within participating Clean Plant Centers.

In the first phase of work the programmers are building their understanding of how each Center is currently managing data. Three Centers are currently working with the development team: the Arkansas and Oregon Berry Centers and the North Carolina multi-crop Clean Plant Center. The result of this work will be standardized data formats that can be used throughout the NCPN system, development of a system to manage provenance of accessions, sample registry with unique IDs, provenance history, and physical location tracking of plants and samples. When these core tools are completed and the three test Centers successfully onboarded, the tool will be made available for other Centers to join.