Category: GIS

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Portal on India’s Biodiversity

Agro-ecological zones of IndiaThere’s been a bit of buzz on the intertubes recently about a shiny new portal on India’s biodiversity. At last, it is live, and I have had a preliminary play with it. The first thing to say is that it is very, very slick. The information is well presented and appears quickly. The second thing to say is that while there is definitely some information there about things agricultural, it is a little high level at the moment. But that could easily change. The portal is open source and open to users, so people who really know about farming in India can get in there and make it their own, with reports from the field, performance data, and who knows what else.

I wonder whether it would be possible to give them layers (I believe that’s the technical term) of information about, say, genebank accessions, or predicted climate changes, or crop suitability, or …

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Crop maps of Russia and its neighbors

I have often looked for detailed crop distribution maps for the countries of the former Soviet Union and found these hard to come by. Not any more! There is a fabulous on-line atlas of agriculture in Russia and neighboring countries.

It has descriptions and maps for a 100 crops, including potato and wheat of course, but also lesser known niceties as the Snowball Tree, Sea Bucktorn and Winter Squash. The maps are pretty, here is an example for Siberian Wild Rye (you know, Siberian Black-eyed Susan; Clinelymus sibiricus (L.) Nevski). Better still, they will be available for dowload in GIS format next year.

Distribution of Siberian wild rye

There are also entries for 540 wild crop relatives and other agriculturally relevant plants, and for pests, diseases and weeds.

Awesome.