Global multi-crop agricultural trial data supported by citizen science

Global multi-crop agricultural trial data supported by citizen science

The triadic comparison of technologies (tricot) is a citizen science approach for testing technology options in their target environments, which has been applied to on-farm testing of crop varieties. ‘Triadic’ refers to the sets of three technology options that are compared by each participant. In the approach, participants are invited to test an anonymous set of three technologies (out of a larger number, generally between 5 to 20) randomly assigned. Between 2011 and 2025 the tricot approach was applied in more than 25 countries across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America with more than 30 crops.

tricot data v1

This release consolidates standardized trial outputs from participatory on-farm evaluations implemented through the tricot (triadic comparison of technology options) approach. This dataset supports re-use for variety evaluation, genotype-by-environment research, target population of environments (TPE) analyses, farmer preference modeling, and broader work on data-driven crop improvement and climate adaptation.

Number of new studies: 41 
Countries covered: 5 (BJ, ML, TZ, NG, RW)
Crops covered: 10
Total participant observations added: ~12,355 participants