The tricot approach: an agile framework for decentralized on-farm testing supported by citizen science. A retrospective.

Matching crop varieties to their target use context and user preferences is a challenge faced by many plant breeding programs serving smallholder agriculture. Numerous participatory approaches proposed by CGIAR and other research teams over the last four decades have attempted to capture farmers' priorities/preferences and crop variety field performance in representative growing environments through experimental trials with higher external validity. Yet none have overcome the challenges of scalability, data validity and reliability, and difficulties in capturing socio-economic and environmental heterogeneity.

Variance component estimations and mega-environments for sweetpotato breeding in West Africa.

The current study was aimed at identifying mega-environments in Ghana and evaluating adaptability of superior sweetpotato [ (L.) Lam.] genotypes from a targeted breeding effort.