Customer storySouthern Cross University
How Bower gave a plant pathologist more time for actual research
Running a season-long avocado disease trial across four sites, plant pathologist Dr Karina Griffin used Bower to turn paper field data into a queryable digital record, reducing a 100-sample, 20-factor data-entry task from days to minutes.
- Researcher
- Dr Karina Griffin
- Field
- Plant pathology
- Organization
- Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW
“I would spend a whole three days doing data entry.”
At a glance
Data entry days → minutes
A 100-sample sheet with 20 measured factors went from days of entry and cross-checking to five minutes of review.
Sample tracking photos → connected records
Symptom photos were automatically captured with their sample IDs, keeping each observation attached to the culture it came from.
Knowledge transfer context → repeatable execution
Karina’s protocols were transformed into clear, labeled steps, enriched with critical context, allowing others to reproduce the experiment consistently without starting from scratch.
The situation
Establishing how a fruit rot behaves takes volume
Karina Griffin is a plant pathologist at Southern Cross University, working on fruit rots in avocados. Four sites, five trees at each, sampled every two weeks from October through to July, with spore traps in the canopy. Every one of those samples is then DNA profiled to identify which micro-organisms (fungi) are living in the orchard.
Then at harvest, around six hundred fruit were cut open and assessed by hand over a few months. Each site carries three separate post-harvest datasets across a hundred fruit.
The challenges
Paper first
Assessment happens with wet hands and fruit pulp on them. Paper is the only medium that survives it, but every sheet has to be retyped and cross-checked later, a second full pass over the same data.
A fragmented photo record
Hundreds of sample photographs a season went to a personal camera roll, then had to be labeled and manually organized when the project closed.
Expertise doesn’t travel with SOPs
Karina could follow the protocol, but interpreting what is growing on a culture plate relied on her supervisor’s years of experience.
What changed
Across one avocado season
Capture, transcription and handover moved from end-of-season admin into the work itself.
01Capture
Photos land in the project, not the camera roll
Each image is tagged with its sample ID as it is taken, so a photo of a symptom stays linked to the tube of culture that fruit produced, rather than sitting in a personal camera roll to be organized later.
02Transcription
More time in the field
A sheet of a hundred samples scored against twenty factors used to take days to type up and cross-check. It now takes five minutes to review, before it's added to the project record.
03Handover
Critical context becomes a repeatable workflow
Protocols with context Karina has developed over years were reformatted into concise, labeled steps, making them easier for others to understand and follow.
Capture Stream
Every note, photo, voice recording, and AI capture from across your lab, in one chronological feed.
- SHEET
Field Assessment Sheet, 100 Samples × 20 Factors
Paper sheet photographed at the packing shed door. Rows read back into the trial table against protocol Fruit rot assessment v3.
94 of 100 rows parsed, 6 need reviewReview rows22/05/2026 · 11:30TRT. RennickAvocado fruit rot 2026 / Site 3 Mowbray Ridge - PHOTO
Culture Plate At Day 5, Sporulating
Plate photographed on the bench under side light. Colony margin irregular, salmon spore masses at center, consistent with anthracnose.
PLT-0884Linked to AV026-S3-T4-F112, photographed 14/05 07:41. Plated 14/05.
19/05/2026 · 14:02TRT. RennickAvocado fruit rot 2026 / Site 3 Mowbray Ridge - PHOTO
Lesion, Stem End
Cut fruit held one-handed, gloves wet. Captured without unlocking a notebook or typing anything.
AV026-S3-T4-F113ID attached manually 08:0714/05/2026 · 08:06MCM. CalderAvocado fruit rot 2026 / Site 3 Mowbray Ridge - NOTE
Stem End Sporulating, Second Fruit Off This Tree
“Stem end, sporulating, about fourteen mil, second fruit off this tree.”
AV026-S3-T4-F112Transcribed automatically · hands-free.14/05/2026 · 07:43MCM. CalderAvocado fruit rot 2026 / Site 3 Mowbray Ridge - PHOTO
Lesion On Fruit, In Situ
Second fruit off Tree 4, photographed on the tree before cutting. Site 3 Mowbray Ridge, fortnightly round.
AV026-S3-T4-F112ID from scanned tree tag S3-T4, sequence continued from F111.
14/05/2026 · 07:41MCM. CalderAvocado fruit rot 2026 / Site 3 Mowbray Ridge - PHOTO
Lesion, Shoulder, Fruit Assessed At Bench
Logged against the wrong tree in the field and corrected sixteen days later. The capture, the correction and who made it all stay on the record.
AV026-S2-T1-F078Sample ID corrected 16/05 by M. Calder, S2-T2 to S2-T130/04/2026 · 15:58TRT. RennickAvocado fruit rot 2026 / Site 2 Barron Creek
“If you’re spending all that time on data entry, you lose track of it. Bower has given me more time to do the more exciting things in research.”