Dealing with Propagations

Ghini offers the possibility to associate Propagations trials to Plants and to document their treatments and results. Treatments are integral parts of the description of a Propagation trial. If a Propagation trial is successful, Ghini lets you associate it to a new Accession. You can only associate one Accession to a Propagation Trial.

Here we describe how you use this part of the interface.

Creating a Propagation

A Propagation (trial) is obtained from a Plant. Ghini reflects this in its interface: you select a plant, open the Plant Editor on it, activate the Propagation Tab, click on Add.

When you do the above, you get a Propagation Editor window. Ghini does not consider Propagation trials as independent entities. As a result, Ghini treats the Propagation Editor as a special editor window, which you can only reach from the Plant Editor.

For a new Propagation, you select the type of propagation (this becomes an immutable property of the propagation) then insert the data describing it.

You will be able to edit the propagation data via the same path: select a plant, open the Plant Editor, identify the propagation you want to edit, click on the corresponding Edit button. You will be able to edit all properties of an existing Propagation trial, except its type.

In the case of a seed propagation trial, you have a pollen parent, and a seed parent. You should always associate the Propagation trial to the seed parent.

Note

In Ghini-1.0 you specify the pollen parent plant in the “Notes” field, while Ghini-1.1 has a (relation) field for it. According to ITF2, there might be cases in seed propagation trials where it is not known which Plant plays which role. Again, in Ghini-1.0 you should use a note to indicate whether this is the case, Ghini-1.1 has a (boolean) field indicating whether this is the case.

Using a Propagation

A Propagation trial may be successful and result in a new Accession.

Ghini helps you reflect this in the database: create a new Accession, immediately switch to the Source tab and select “Garden Propagation” in the (admittedly somewhat misleading) Contact field.

Start typing the plant number and a list of matching plants with propagation trials will appear for you to select from.

Select the plant, and the list of accessed and unaccessed propagation trials will appear in the lower half of the window.

Select a still unaccessed propagation trial from the list and click on Ok to complete the operation.

Using the data from the Propagation trial, Ghini completes some of the fields in the General tab: Taxon name, Type of material, and possibly Provenance. You will be able to edit these fields, but please note that the software will not prevent introducing conceptual inconsistencies in your database.

You can associate a Propagation trial to only one Accession.