On Tuesday the 15th October the DataPLANT NFDI consortium submitted it's proposal to the DFG. The consortium in Fundamental Plant Research consists of roughly 30 participants including universities and large research institutions distributed over the country. A significant proportion of the participants originate from Baden-Württemberg and the BioDATEN Science Data Center. Further co-applicants are the Technical University of Kaiserslautern and the Forschungszentrum Jülich.

The central aim of the DataPLANT consortium is to advance research data management in it's designated community and generate added value in the field of basic plant research. Successful collaboration and use of data of different modalities – from many sources and experiments, pre-processed or analysed with a variety of algorithms – requires contextualization of the data. The FAIR Data 1 and Linked Open Data Principles provide critical guidelines for research data management. Various consortia have therefore made proposals for best practice and compliance with these principles, but it is almost always the initiative of individual researchers to implement them. Therefore, comprehensive information on the required quality for use by third parties is rarely available. Researchers have been shown to require practical assistance in exploiting the fragmented and complex resource landscape. This increases the need for a tailor-made (infra)structure for research data management. By combining technical expertise in the fields of fundamental plant research, information and computer sciences and infrastructure specialists, DataPLANT will support plant scientists in every RDM concerns. DataPLANT will create a service environment to contextualize research data according to the FAIR principles with minimal additional effort and to support the entire research cycle in modern plant biology. The tailor-made service landscape in DataPLANT will consist of technical-digital assistance as well as on-site personnel assistance. DataPLANT thus creates a central entry point and a valuable subject-specific data and knowledge resource. In combination with teaching and training concepts, data literacy is strengthened and a long-term motivation for the creation of well-indicated data objects is generated. By integrating plant science into the NFDI network as a whole, DataPLANT is driving the digital transformation and democratization of research data in the field.