EMPHASIS

Emphasis on plant phenomics

Research Infrastructure

EMPHASIS aspires to establish a unified and sustainable European research infrastructure for state-of-the-art plant phenotyping facilities. Our vision is to facilitate seamless and lasting access to a wide range of pan-European services, encompassing both existing and future plant and crop phenotyping resources, knowledge, tools, methods, and facilities. This accessibility extends beyond geographical constraints, serving the needs of the plant phenotyping community, researchers from academia and industry, funders, policy makers, and beyond.

Background information

Aim

EMPHASIS ERIC aims to enable and empower world-class, innovative phenotyping research that transcends national boundaries, fostering collaboration and excellence in the field. By establishing a consolidated and coordinated European research infrastructure for plant phenotyping it will reduce duplication of efforts, enable a step-change in capability and knowledge exchange, provide a unified entry point for accessing facilities, data, and resources, and address current and future European challenges towards food security, agriculture and climate change.

The European Strategy Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has identified “Plant Phenotyping” as a priority for the European research area, and EMPHASIS has been listed on the ESFRI Roadmap 2016 for Research Infrastructures. Since then, EMPHASIS has concluded its preparatory phase in 2021 and started implementation. Therein, ministry and scientific representatives from eleven countries discuss and decide on the strategic aspects of EMPHASIS operation as part of the EMPHASIS Interim General Assembly. In parallel, EMPHASIS runs pilot services intended to lead to the full EMPHASIS service portfolio once being operational.

“Phenotyping for future winter wheat varieties” by Oliver Knopf (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany)

About the EMPHASIS pilot services:

EMPHASIS facilitates standardized and interoperable plant phenotyping in multi-environment field experiments through different field phenotyping services.
EMPHASIS coordinates and support various training activities in plant phenotyping.
EMPHASIS helps users to bridge the gaps towards a local information system following FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable), so their datasets can be used by a large scientific community.
EMPHASIS works closely with the plant phenotyping community to develop Good Phenotyping Practices that will ensure experimental reproducibility and reusability of data.
EMPHASIS aims to drive innovation in plant phenotyping technologies to ensure long-term sustainable excellence.
The modelling online portal offers image analysis software tools, image data sets and plant models.
The EMPHASIS Infrastructure Map provides an overview of plant phenotyping installations across Europe.

About our joint cluster projects with partners from the RI landscape:

Life-Science RIs: EMPHASIS is partner in the Life-Science-RI community with 13 research infrastructure from biomedical research area aiming at the development of synergies to provide access to cutting-edge biomedical research infrastructures
ENVRIcommunity: EMPHASIS is a partner of the environmental RI community with 26 environmental and earth system research infrastructures aiming at developing integrated solutions to create a more coherent, interdisciplinary and interoperable cluster of Environmental Research Infrastructures across Europe
EOSC-Life: Together with 13 other ESFRI projects from the "Health and Food" sector, EMPHASIS is developing a digital platform for cooperation across disciplinary boundaries in order to make data available and usable in accordance with FAIR principles
ENRIITC: EMPHASIS is an associate partner of the ENRIITC project that supports the establishment of strategic, cross-border partnerships between industry and research infrastructures
AgroServ: EMPHASIS provides integrated services towards agroecology together with more than 70 partners in Europe
AI4Life: EMPHASIS helps to build competences on Artificial Intelligence in the Life Science community by outreach and training events and by dissemination towards its wide-spread user communities
CROPINNO: EMPHASIS provides knowledge and experience on research infrastructure management to a key scientific institution on climate-smart crop production in the Western Balkans, the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops, Novi Sad (IFVCNS)
Microbes-4-Climate: EMPHASIS provides integrated addressing climate change risks for biodiversity and for agricultural and forestry ecosystem together with 31 partners.
PHENET: EMPHASIS develops tools and methods for extended plant PHENotyping and EnviroTyping services of European Research Infrastructures together with 3 partnering Ris.