Wisconsin diversity panel phenotypes: spoken descriptions of plants and supporting data

Phenotyping plants in a field environment can involve a variety of methods including the use of automated instruments and labor-intensive manual measurement and scoring. Researchers also collect language-based phenotypic descriptions and use controlled vocabularies and structures such as ontologies to enable computation on descriptive phenotype data, including methods to determine phenotypic similarities. In this study, spoken descriptions of plants were collected and observers were instructed to use their own vocabulary to describe plant features that were present and visible. Further, these plants were measured and scored manually as part of a larger study to investigate whether spoken plant descriptions can be used to recover known biological phenomena.

Data comprise phenotypic observations of 686 accessions of the maize Wisconsin Diversity panel, and 25 positive control accessions that carry visible, dramatic phenotypes. The data include the list of accessions planted, field layout, data collection procedures, student participants' (whose personal data are protected for ethical reasons) and volunteers' observation transcripts, volunteers' audio data files, terrestrial and aerial images of the plants, Amazon Web Services method selection experimental data, and manually collected phenotypes (e.g., plant height, ear and tassel features, etc.; measurements and scores). Data were collected during the summer of 2021 at Iowa State University's Agricultural Engineering and Agronomy Research Farms.