Category: GIS

Posted on

Yemen spatial data online, sort of

For what it’s worth, I have enormous admiration for IFPRI and its products. Not that they give a damn about that, but I just want to get it out of the way before slamming them. First, the news item on a new interactive atlas of food security in Yemen doesn’t have a link to the new interactive atlas of food security in Yemen. Not to worry, though, Google is your friend, ((Especially if they grant you a Google Earth pro license. Thanks, guys!)) and it’s not all that difficult to find the relevant page on the IFPRI website. But then the new interactive atlas of food security in Yemen turns out to be nice enough as to content, but highly frustrating to use. No way to download or export maps. I had to get the thing below (showing barley cultivation, for the record) through a screen grab. Yuch.

And no way to mash up the results with other stuff. Like, for example, barley accessions in Genesys. Which in contrast you can export in a number of ways.

Oh, sure, there are some words of explanation, if not excuse:

The online version does not require installing software but it is more limited in the sense that the underlying data cannot be accessed by the user (unlike in the case of the download of the data package).

But I don’t believe it would be that difficult to allow some sort of exporting online. Maybe I’m wrong. Someone tell me, please.

So, anyway, two maps which cry out to be looked at together, for example in Google Earth, and no way of doing so, at least that I can see. As I say, very frustrating. Who do I complain to? There someone in the CGIAR to whom I can go with a query about spatial data, right? Isn’t there?

Posted on

Nibbles: Flora, Agronomy podcasts, Stats, GFAR, Horses, Lettuce, Churst forests, Brazil nut, Grassland diversity, Baobab, Flotation, Botanic gardens and invasives, Nutrigenomics

Posted on

Agrobiodiversity and languages in danger

I’ve finally been able to obtain the dataset on which UNESCO’s interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is based. ((Thanks, Kai.)) In the map below, which you’ll be able to see bigger if you click on it, you can see Chad’s endangered languages (brighter red means more endangered), mashed up with germplasm from Chad listed in Genesys.

Would it be sensible to give particular priority for germplasm collecting to areas where languages are threatened with extinction?

Posted on

Gaps in cassava collection in Africa highlighted

A request from MapSpaM for people to help them in mapping the distribution of cassava cultivation in Africa ((You may remember us mentioning MapSpaM before as part of an ongoing discussion of crop distribution data.)) forced me into some more playing with Google Earth. I just took MapSpaM’s draft cassava map…

…and plonked on top of it the germplasm provenance data from Genesys. Here’s the result (right click to save the kmz file):

Which highlights — not for the first time, but very powerfully — the lack of material from eastern and southern Africa in the international genebanks. It is definitely important to think about safety duplicating national collections from those countries.

Here’s a close-up for West Africa:

Pretty good representation overall, but even here there are some definite gaps. Time to get collecting again in Africa too. Though of course a geographic gap is not necessarily a genetic gap…