Grasspea is one of the world’s most under-recognised legumes.
It does not dominate headlines or global markets. Yet in some of the world’s most fragile agricultural systems, it quietly does what few crops can: survive. In drought-prone soils, under erratic rainfall, and across marginal lands where agricultural options are limited, grasspea persists.
For many communities, living under harsh environmental conditions, grasspea remains a resilient and dependable crop. Often, during the harshest seasons, it is what ensures people still have access to food on the table. But while the crop itself is resilient, the knowledge surrounding it has remained fragmented.
Over decades, grasspea research has steadily expanded across regions and disciplines. From Bangladesh to Spain and Portugal, from Ethiopia to Belgium and UK, scientists have explored its genetics, nutrition, agronomy, stress adaptation, and role in food and nutrition security. While valuable datasets exist across germplasm collections, field trials, genotyping studies, and environmental observations, much of this information remains isolated, stored in disconnected systems, unpublished files, spreadsheets, or incompatible formats.
The grasspea data exists, but it does not yet connect.
This fragmentation has real consequences: When datasets remain siloed, their value becomes limited. Researchers cannot easily build upon each other’s work. Insights that could accelerate breeding, adaptation, or collaboration remain difficult to discover and reuse.
The challenge is often not a lack of research, but a lack of connected systems. This closely reflect the data principles promoted by GO FAIR, a bottom-up, stakeholder-driven, and self-governed initiative. Its aim is FAIR, making research and data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. By improving standardisation, accessibility, and interoperability through platforms such as Germinate and GrasspeaNet, current efforts aim to make grasspea research more connected, reusable, and collaborative across institutions and regions.
Learn more about the FAIR Principles
A shift is now underway.
Emerging efforts are helping create a more connected and collaborative data ecosystem for grasspea research.
The GrasspeaNet is an online platform dedicated to sharing information and updates on grasspea. It aims at creating a place that fostersconnections among researchers, institutions, and stakeholders working across different areas of grasspea.
Building on this momentum, collaborative efforts involving researchers associated with The James Hutton Institute are helping improve the structure, standardisation, and accessibility of grasspea data through Germinate, an open-source platform designed to support crop research and genetic resource management.
At the same time, community-driven efforts are supported by the Fernand Lambein Fund. The fund carries out several activities, including the Lathyrus Day, the first scientific conference entirely dedicated to grasspea and a newsletter providing updates on scientific and community initiatives. These are helping ensure that this transformation is not only technical but also inclusive and participatory.
In this context, from 2026 the Fund has launched GROW‑Grasspea, an initiative aimed at maintaining and enhancing the GrasspeaNet and Germinate platforms to provide the grasspea community with updated data for its overall benefit.
Data, on its own, is limited.
When data is shared, standardised, and connected through a common system, it becomes more than information; it becomes infrastructure for collaboration, discovery, and long-term progress.
This ecosystem aims to improve visibility of ongoing and past research projects, support interoperable and reusable datasets, strengthen collaboration across institutions and regions, and improve access to grasspea-related knowledge and resources.
Importantly, this is not about replacing existing efforts. It is about connecting them. Ensuring that every contribution, whether a dataset, publication, field trial, or project, becomes part of a larger and evolving research ecosystem.
This is the vision behind Germinate x GrasspeaNet via GROW-Grasspea:
not simply to collect data, but to create a shared space where knowledge can be connected, discovered, and built upon.
This ecosystem aims to improve the visibility of ongoing and past research, support interoperable and reusable datasets, strengthen collaboration across institutions and regions, and improve access to grasspea-related knowledge and resources.
Grasspea’s strength has always been its ability to endure in isolation. But its future depends on connection and that connection starts with data.
If you are working on grasspea, whether in genetics, agronomy, nutrition, resilience, breeding, or environmental research, your work is part of this evolving story. By contributing to a shared ecosystem of projects and data, you help transform individual efforts into collective progress.
Because when data comes together, so does the community.
Share your project. Contribute your data. Help give grasspea the visibility and connection it deserves.
📩 Contact us: contact@lambeinfund.org
Germinate and the GrasspeaNet are collaborative efforts involving multiple institutions, including The James Hutton Institute, and are supported through the Crop Trust BOLD project funded by the Government of Norway. Grasspea is one of the important underutilized crops being promoted under this initiative.
The Fernand Lambein Fund (FLF), administered by the King Baudouin Foundation (KBF), continues to support these efforts through the GROW–Grasspea Initiative, Lathyrus Day, and newsletter publications. Together, we are advancing sustainable agriculture, and more resilient food systems.
Priyanka Gupta is a Scientific Consultant with the GROW-Grasspea Initiative at the Fernand Lambein Fund. Her work focuses on global data integration, research coordination, and outreach for climate-resilient crops.
Priyanka Gupta
vidhiguptaniwari@gmail.com
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What specific types of project or data contributions are most needed in the grasspea research ecosystem to address gaps in breeding for resilience, and how can researchers ensure their data is interoperable with existing databases?
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