AMES, Iowa – In its native habitat, switchgrass flowered earlier when growing farther north. In experiments with diverse genetic samples, it flowered earlier in the south.
The discrepancy wasn’t a welcome sight for a research team studying how prairie grasses respond in different environments, but resolving the apparent conflict led the scientists to draw better conclusions, showing the potential value of large public data sets collected in natural growing conditions.
The study published late last month in the high-profile, peer-reviewed scientific journal Cell, “Harnessing citizen science to contextualize adaptation mechanism discovery,” integrated trends culled from AI-powered scans of tens of thousands of online photos of perennial grasses with findings from two years of growing switchgrass at research sites across the Midwest and Gulf regions as well as a detailed molecular characterization of three underlying genes involved in switchgrass flowering.
Led in part by Iowa State University agronomy professor Jianming Yu, the research team identified the genetic basis for adaptative responses that help explain the contradictory flowering-time trends. But the framework – wringing useful insight from “citizen science,” in this case an online cache of photos mostly from iNaturalist – is as notable as the findings, said Yu, the Pioneer Hi-Bred Distinguished Chair in Maize Breeding and director of the Raymond F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding.
“With this study, we have connected our quantitative genetic and genomic research with ecology, evolution and adaptation over a large-scale landscape. The beauty is we’re bridging them together so we can see the whole picture,” he said.