The study of plant phenomics in the field involves complex efforts of data collection and analysis. There are countless parameters of potential relevance ranging from the information about the soil, relevant microbiomes, plants at different stages of development, changing climatic conditions and so forth; and no universal approaches to identifying and labelling relevant traits. This paper investigates attempts to share phenomic data about crops across different locations, and particularly between high-resourced and low-resourced research environments. I focus on the Crop Ontology, a digital infrastructure that was developed by an international network coordinated by researchers in Montpellier over the last decade to facilitate the sharing of information between plant scientists working in laboratories, experimental farms and plant stations in Europe, the United States, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and various Eastern countries. I document the development of the Crop Ontology in relation to CassavaBase and YamBase, two “open” databases used to data from field trials carried out in West-Africa. On the basis of archival sources and interview material from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan (Nigeria), I discuss how Crop Ontology curators confronted challenges relating both to the diversity of tools, terminologies, and variables used to describe widely diverse species in different parts of the world, and to the differences in expectations, goals, and working conditions among researchers and technicians involved in efforts of data collection.
