Luigi Guarino

June 26, 2012

Featured: Crop mapping

Andy Farrow has some issues with crop mapping too:

I found Monfreda and SPAM were ‘better’ in different places when I was reviewing the legumes but still there are large areas of confusion between, for example, common beans and cowpeas.

Oh, and he too would like to know how exactly the people behind the Global Yield Gap Atlas decided to use HarvestChoice’s Spatial Production Allocation Model to do their mapping.

June 26, 2012July 3, 2019

HarvestChoice crop mapping gets the nod

Our friends of the HarvestChoice team at IFPRI have been busy. Hot on the heels of MAPPR, comes news that their Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM) will be used to produce a Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA), which will “reveal the ‘gap’ between the current average yields of farms and their maximum production potential.” Sounds very useful. We have blogged about SPAM before. I was particularly intrigued by this statement in the IFPRI post on the subject, though:

At a recent GYGA meeting in Naivasha, Kenya, Atlas collaborators—which include Jawoo Koo of IFPRI—comparatively reviewed two major crop distribution maps and announced that they would use the ones produced by an IFPRI model—the Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM)—as a basis for the Atlas.

It would be interesting to know what the other lot of crop distribution maps were, the ones that were found wanting. One of our earlier posts does try to get to grips with the taxonomy of crop mapping, not particularly comprehensively, it has to be said. So was it perhaps CIAT’s Crop Atlas of the World? ¹ Or was it the dataset of Monfreda et al. (2008), “Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000”? Or something else that we missed at the time? Maybe HarvestChoice/IFPRI are too modest to say, but it would still be good to know the basis for GYGA’s decision.

June 26, 2012June 26, 2012

Nibbles: Agroforestry award, Medieval agrobiodiversity, Agricultural R&D, Fermentation, Climate-smart agriculture, Drought, Aleurites moluccana, Language erosion, Sri Lanka, Livestock, Peas

My friend Zac bags a well-deserved award.
Agricultural diversity in the Middle Ages: squirrels and cotton. And there’s probably more where those came from…
Keeping score on agricultural research spending.
Fermentables interview.
What does this climate-smart agriculture look like anyway?
And do they ever need it in the American midwest.
And what in blazes is candlenut?
A tool for documenting endangered languages. Maybe endangered landraces or crops one day too…
Documented: One Sri Lankan farmer’s thoughts on sustainable agriculture.
Not to mention the plusses and minuses of livestock — straight from the horse’s mouth.
And the myth that will not die: King Tut’s peas alive and thriving. Kudos to Jackson Holtz, a properly skeptical reporter.

June 25, 2012February 17, 2014

Nibbles: Fork, Prairies, Cynodon, Clove, Impact, Amazon, Blog, Horse, Thyme, Mauritius, Dyes

Slate puts a fork in, well, the fork.
Gotta love the Prairies.
Mysterious Cattle Deaths Caused by GMO Grass: not GMO, not particularly mysterious.
Gotta love the Spice Islands.
How scientists can extract impact from their ~~navel-gazing~~ research.
Gotta love online mapping platforms.
Another journal starts a blog.
Horses in agriculture, and history.
Gotta love za’tar. It’s about thyme.
Sweeter than sugar. Mauritius goes for fair trade and diversification.
Dying for batik.

June 25, 2012June 25, 2012

Brainfood: Synthetic wheat, Pisum, Maize products, Seed predation, Cajanus, Tripsacum, Horse domestication, Cicer genomics, Cereal vulnerability, Allotments, Conservation units, Chilie diversity, Endophytes

Sources of resistance in primary synthetic hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to insect pests: Hessian fly, Russian wheat aphid and Sunn pest in the fertile crescent. Domestication do-over continues to show promise. Closest thing to a jetpack?
Evaluation of seed yield and seed yield components in red–yellow (Pisum fulvum) and Ethiopian (Pisum abyssinicum) peas. Weird pea species show promise in Serbia, of all places.
Consumer preferences for maize products in urban Kenya. Most still like it white. Not much promise there.
Bush pig (Potamochoerus porcus) seed predation of bush mango (Irvingia gabonensis) and other plant species in Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s pretty unpromising for seeds, especially right under the tree.
Phenotypic diversity in Cajanus species and identification of promising sources for agronomic traits and seed protein content. 14 accessions of 8 seem promising (out of a total of 198 accessions of 18 species from the ICRISAT collection).
Genetic relations among Tripsacum species revealed by genomic variation. They might be promising.
Reconstructing the origin and spread of horse domestication in the Eurasian steppe. Wild Equus ferus moves out of eastern Eurasian steppe 160 kya, shows promise, gets domesticated in the western part, but continues to introgress with local wild horses as it moves out from there.
Large-scale development of cost-effective SNP marker assays for diversity assessment and genetic mapping in chickpea and comparative mapping in legumes. What can I tell you. It’s large-scale. It’s cost effective. It’s promising. I’m still waiting for my jetpack.
The socioeconomics of food crop production and climate change vulnerability: a global scale quantitative analysis of how grain crops are sensitive to drought. It’s the middle income countries that are especially vulnerable, and thus where all that promise needs to come good.
Deskilling, agrodiversity, and the seed trade: a view from contemporary British allotments. Please promise to keep open-pollinated heirlooms out of the marketplace.
Harnessing genomics for delineating conservation units. But you need to combine information from neutral and adaptive markers in fancy ways to fulfill the promise.
Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency. It’s all about how much water is available.
Endophytic Insect-Parasitic Fungi Translocate Nitrogen Directly from Insects to Plants. Suppose we better promise to conserve these things too then. And here’s the slightly longer short version.