Summary Heterogeneous and multidisciplinary data generated by research on sustainable global agriculture and agrifood systems requires quality data labeling or annotation in order to be interoperable. As recommended by the FAIR principles, data, labels, and metadata must use controlled vocabularies and ontologies that are popular in the knowledge domain and commonly used by the community. Despite the existence of robust ontologies in the Life Sciences, there is currently no comprehensive full set of ontologies recommended for data annotation across agricultural research disciplines. In this paper, we discuss the added value of the Ontologies Community of Practice (CoP) of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture for harnessing relevant expertise in ontology development and identifying innovative solutions that support quality data annotation. The Ontologies CoP stimulates knowledge sharing among stakeholders, such as researchers, data managers, domain experts, experts in ontology design, and platform development teams.

Increasing tree cover in agricultural lands can contribute to achieving global and national restoration goals, more so in the drylands where trees play a key role in enhancing both ecosystem and livelihood resilience of the communities that depend on them. Despite this, drylands are characterized by low tree survival especially for tree species preferred by local communities. We conducted a study in arid and semi-arid areas of Kenya and Ethiopia with 1773 households to assess how different tree planting and management practices influence seedling survival. Using on-farm planned comparisons, farmers experimented and compared tree survival under different planting and management practices as well as under varying socioeconomic and biophysical contexts in the two countries. Seedling survival was monitored at least six months after planting. Results show that watering, manure application, seedling protection by fencing and planting in a small hole (30 cm diameter and 45 cm depth) had a significant effect on tree seedling survival in Kenya, while in Ethiopia, mulching, watering and planting niche were significant to tree survival. Household socioeconomics and farms’ biophysical characteristics such as farm size, education level of the household head, land tenure, age of the household head had significant effects on seedling survival in both Ethiopia and Kenya while presence of soil erosion on the farm had a significant effect in Kenya. Soil quality ranking was positively correlated with tree survival in Ethiopia, regardless of species assessed. Current findings have confirmed effects of context specific variables some involving intrahousehold socioeconomic status such education level of the household head, and farm size that influence survival.

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