Lauren Snyder - ORKG, Biodiversity & Discovering Trends

"It has been a really fun challenge and I feel like I am learning a lot!"

Lauren Snyder is an agroecologist and science communicator working at the Institute of Geobotany at Leibniz University Hanover. During the curation grant program, she curated content for different public health and biodiversity topics. One of her Comparisons focuses on the question: Do legume intercrops provide yield benefits in European agroecosystems? Finding quantitative results that could be easily incorporated into the ORKG already provided a challenge, as many papers only presented data in figures where exact values could not easily be determined. Thus, she uses her talk to highlight the importance of producing machine-actionable data from the outset. After finding suitable studies, she compared them and visualized them using ORKG’s semi-automatic visualization service. The visualization revealed that in most cases legume intercrops did not have a significant effect on crop yields, but she discovered several outliers: In three out of eighteen studies, there was an observed yield loss when intercropping with legumes. She highlighted that these cases might be an interesting subject for further studies to identify the mechanisms driving the reduced performance in legume intercrops. In this way, ORKG helped to elucidate trends for new research topics.