DUDE: A user-friendly crop information system

A crop information system facilitates the storage, retrieval, and utilization of historical crop performance data. Here, we report a user-friendly crop information system entitled Data Unification and Distillation Engine (DUDE), which (i) converts data from spreadsheet formats to a relational database, (ii) allows editing of tables in the database, (iii) simplifies the construction and execution of queries from the database, (iv) formats queried data into a variety of file structures for data analyses, and (v) simplifies maintenance and corrections of data in the database. DUDE runs on any personal computer that operates with Windows 2000 or later versions of Microsoft Windows. DUDE is freely available from the authors.