Category: GIS

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Yield trial sites mapped

Glenn Hyman has a great map over at AGCommons. It shows the sites in Africa where international crop networks carried out yield trials in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s (and some beyond). Here it is:

trialsites2

Would be interesting to compare with the various accessibility maps I posted a couple of days ago, and indeed with agroclimatic maps. No doubt Glen is doing it as we speak, and lots of other stuff too.

Read the interesting comment too: “Africa’s green revolutions will be fundamentally different from Asia’s — because Africa and Asia are fundamentally different, because times have changed, and because we have learnt a few tricks in the meanwhile!!”

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Three different ways of looking at Africa

I ran the Last of the Wild dataset I talked about yesterday past our friend Andy Nelson, he of the accessibility map, and his reaction was that there was a quick paper, or at least an MSc thesis, in comparing that map with his and with the product of the GLOBIO project. Well, here’s what Africa looks like according to the three different methodologies, just to give you a taste. Quite similar, at first look, though we’ll have to wait for that MSc to be sure, I guess. Now, the question is, can such data be used to predict things like the amount of agrobiodiversity in farmers’ fields?
africa-wild

africa-time

africa-globio

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The call of the wild

Not sure how long they’ve been available, but I’ve just learned that the new versions of the Last of the Wild maps are out. The first version is a few years old now.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University have joined together to systematically map and measure the human influence on the Earth’s land surface today. The Last of The Wild, Version Two depicts human influence on terrestrial ecosystems using data sets compiled on or around 2000.

These are Europe’s most untouched areas:
europe

Not much left. There are also global and continental maps of human footprint and human influence index, although I must say I haven’t fully digested the difference between the two. And you can download the data and play around with it yourself, of course. Let the mashing begin!

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Nibbles: Biodiversity loss, Mapping, Mongolia, Ag origins, Polynesian voyaging, Hybrid fruits, Apricots, Bedouins, Donkeys, Chile, Cuba

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Visualizing agrobiodiversity in markets

I’ve just come across two Flickr groups which are intensely interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective. Flickr is a photo sharing site, and I have in fact blogged about it before here, for example on how it could be used to map crop diversity. The two groups bring together photos taken in markets, with a lot of fruits and vegetables featured. As with my previous post on tomatoes, have a look at the mapping option in particular. A great time-waster, but I bet it could be used to look at geographic patterns in vegetable diversity in markets.