Vision & Strategy

Vision
The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) will foster the development of a diverse, multi-disciplinary community of scientists, teachers, and students, and a cyberinfrastructure that facilitates significant advances in the understanding of plant science by this community through the application of computational thinking and approaches to Grand Challenge problems in plant biology and computer science.

Strategy
iPlant will achieve this Vision through a number of strategic efforts that include the following objectives:

• Foster the formation and development of Grand Challenge Projects and Project Teams that cover a diverse variety of plant biology and computer science disciplines.
• Adopt and create the best and most appropriate cyberinfrastructure (CI) to build a plant science-focused CI system ideally suited for existing and future plant science questions, data, and computational tools.
• Promote computational thinking and approaches within Grand Challenge Teams and the entire plant science research and education community by stimulating collaborations, developing appropriate tools, and supporting training from K-12 through higher academic institutions.