Selecting subjective traits in multiple sites. | Developing an Eastern Broccoli Industry

Zach Stansell has adapted his tool for breeders so that it is usable for any crop that has a highly subjective breeding goal.

Stansell with computer code — Zach Stansell has developed an R package that helps breeders assess their criteria for subjective traits like beauty in many locations.

We are sharing the information with various media outlets. The first pass is a publication in the Cornell Chronicle.

Many horticultural crops need to meet the quality criteria of a particular market or of the main breeder. They need to meet those criteria in many environments. How can you test for quality in many locations at the same time. This technique is good at predicting the reference person’s quality score by having trained raters make objective measurements.

The package is posted on GitHub so that anyone can use it for free. It is annotated and revised to work with just about any trait of interest or any crop. The revision was done with Deniz Akdemir, Cornell statistician. The development of the method is published in HortScience (Stansell, Zachary, Thomas Björkman, Sandra Branham, David Couillard, and Mark W. Farnham. 2017. Use of a Quality Trait Index to Increase the Reliability of Phenotypic Evaluations in Broccoli HortScience 32:1490-1495. doi: 10.21273/HORTSCI12202-17 )