Category: GIS

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Reforestation: Where, why, and how much?

There’s been a spate of papers on reforestation just lately and I was despairing of being able to keep track of them, let alone read them. But along comes Jonah Busch, Chief Economist at Earth Innovation, to make sense of all the maps in a couple of tweets:

Here are the papers:

Thanks, Jonah!

LATER: There’s a nice round-up of two of the studies in Mother Nature Network. Bottom line is in the title: Massive reforestation might be the moonshot we need to slow down climate change. That doesn’t mean forests are a silver bullet, though.

LATER STILL: And, of course, who is also important.

AND FINALLY: Some objections have arisen…

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Go North, rice!

You might think that Queen’s Line off Drake Road, Chatham, ON N7M 5T1, Canada is the furthest north that rice grows in the world. That’s near Lake Erie, after all.

But you’d be wrong, and so was I. The latitude is 42°19’59.7″N. And there’s rice cultivation in China and central Asia, maybe even Italy’s Po valley, north of the 45th parallel, according to this map. ((Which we’ve blogged about before, natch.))

We know the furthest south that rice is grown.

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The spread of agriculture in Europe, genebank edition

A recent Nibble pointed to an image of new, updated map of the expansion of agriculture in Europe. As is usually the case when I see almost any map, I immediately started to think about mashing it up with the localities of genebank accessions. Downloading barley landrace data from Genesys and importing it into Google Earth was easy. And you can also import an image into Google Earth, so it is theoretically possible to superimpose accessions on spread of agriculture.

Unfortunately, the practice is not straightforward, because you have to distort the image by hand to fit neatly on top of the map in Google Earth, and that can take a while. I gave up after about an hour, and after some googling eventually found Map Warper, which does the distortion for you for free. Importing the warped map into Google Maps resulted in a perfect fit.

So here’s the result.

It looks like there are barley landrace accessions from most of the areas highlighted, with dates, in the spread of agriculture map, though they are by no means all equally covered. At least as far as Genesys knows. There have of course been a number of studies looking at the geographic pattern of distribution of genetic diversity in barley in and around Europe. As far as remember, none of them explicitly took into account how long the crop had been in different places. But the material could be available for such a study to be done.

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Brainfood: Macadamia domestication, Middle Eastern wheat, ART virus, Open science, Red Queen, Food system change, Chinese Neolithic booze, Dough rings, Making maps, Biofortification, Endophytes, African maize, Switchgrass diversity, Ancestral legume