Category: GIS

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Spatial datasets continue to proliferate, and evolve

A few more huge spatial datasets for you this morning, as I deal with jet-lag in a Maryland hotel room at 4 am.

Today there’s a high resolution dataset of the population of Africa. And an analysis of wetland protected areas. ((See in particular the map at the end of the paper superimposing Ramsar sites on the Vavilov Centres of Origin.)) And finally a global dataset of particulate matter pollution. This is presented from a human health perspective, but it could have applications in agriculture too.

Bean production environments in East Africa.

I still want to know who’s keeping track of this stuff. Maybe you don’t need to, you can just google as the need arises, but somehow I doubt it. Would love to hear from the CGIAR’s spatial data consortium folks, if they’re listening.

Meanwhile, one of the participants in that consortium has announced that they’re updating one of their iconic products, the now oldish “Atlas of the Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in Africa.”

Bean accessions recorded in Genesys.

How long before they mash it up with that population dataset? And with the data on the location of genebank accessions, for example from Genesys.

Not that it hasn’t been done before, in a very crude way, as you can see in the map in Figure 2 below.

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Europe maps its soil biodiversity

The Land Management & Natural Hazards Unit of the EU’s Joint Research Centre has just announced the publication of a European Atlas of Soil Biodiversity. Here’s the map showing where soil biodiversity is most at risk.

This is part of JRC’s European Soil Database, which complements similar soil mapping projects for other parts of the world. Grist to the FIGS mill. Here, for example, is the map of saline soils in Europe. Seems like Spain and Hungary may be the places to go if you’re looking for salt-tolerance in crop wild relatives.

Meanwhile, in England they’re worried about how effective their protected areas are at, well, protecting biodiversity, though I’m not sure to what extent that includes the soil kind. And since we’re on the subject of maps, here’s one of the protected area network of England (Tier 1 is the highest level of protection).

We’ve noted here before how our friend Nigel Maxted and his co-workers at the University of Birmingham are working to have crop wild relatives included in the thinking about protected areas in the UK. We know from their research that in fact many important crop wild relatives fall outside the protected area network altogether. It would be interesting to know to what extent these species were considered in the review of the effectiveness of the system.

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Spatial datasets in the limelight

Two papers describing interesting spatial datasets appeared in my feed reader today. One looks at global landuse change over the past 12,000 years. Here’s the historical course of cropland expansion; there’s a similar set of maps for pastures:

The other paper concentrates on Europe, mapping out the intensity and type of farming, the idea being that not all “cropland” is the same:

In both cases you should be able to get a bigger image by clicking on it. I guess if we’re ever going to be able to investigate the link between agrobiodiversity and livelihoods on a global scale, ((Or even just agrobiodiversity and human population density.)) as people are doing with biodiversity and ecosystem services with poverty, we’re going to have to start with such datasets, enriched with diversity, including genetic diversity, data (or proxies).

How to bring in that diversity data? There are some ideas out there. But there’s a long way to go before we have a global picture of the current spatial distribution of crop diversity.

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