Category: GIS

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A roadmap to better mapping

Geographers and cartographers often use 2-3 three different software packages for data analysis: they will probably never settle around one tool, online at that, and create a ‘community’ of users there. Instead, the NGOs interested in such a tool should rather offer geo-info advice and look at light open-source GIS software to distribute: how many development workers in the field have had difficulties with the (basic) tabular conversions associated with GPS data? Many many me thinks.

That’s Cédric Jeanneret-Grosjean on online mapping resources. What he’s saying is that they, er, should not be online. Bold. Very bold. But a model that has in fact been followed, at least for the spatial analysis of biodiversity, agricultural and otherwise. And with some success. Maybe time for the crop distribution modellers to try it?

Let’s remember this is important. We’re not just arguing about how to make prettier maps. Identifying what constraints are going to be most significant, when, where in the world, for each crop, is going to be crucial in setting breeding agendas for the next 20 years and more. Breeders need to be able to explore and interrogate these future suitability maps, and explain what they get out of them to their bosses and the policy-makers above them. It’s important to make them as accessible and easy to use as possible. What we have at the moment is not fit for purpose.

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Still waiting for a decent way to map change in climate suitability

There seems — inevitably — to be something of a competition out there to produce maps of changes in climatic suitability for different crops. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. The recent launch of FAO’s GAEZ Data Portal gives us a much-needed alternative to the all-but-unusable offering by CCAFS. Sad to say, it is not much of an alternative.

Here’s the quick version. CCAFS’s Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network allows you to map current suitability, future suitability and change in suitability for a few crops. The example below is change of suitability for Phaseolus beans in Africa. I wasn’t able to get rid of those extraneous place markers, nor to export the results other than by screengrab, nor to import my own data to super-impose, nor to include the legend in any sensible way.

FAO tries to fill the gaping hole left by this well-meaning but flawed tool by providing something that: has menus which are extremely cumbersome to navigate; does not include change in suitability, but then doesn’t let you combine present and future suitability to do your own analysis; does allow you to choose different climate models, but again not to combine the results; does allow various download options, none of them particularly useful, and then only if you register; and, needless to say, doesn’t allow you to import data.

It’s hard to say how one could better replicate, and in fact accentuate, the bad features of one tool, while ignoring whatever good things it had. Frankly, I’m running out of patience with websites which are clearly designed by one set of geeks for another set of geeks. Meanwhile, users — you know, the people for whom this stuff is allegedly produced — are left to cry over their keyboards, and think of what might have been. And regret the fact that they’ll never get back the hour they’ve just wasted.

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Nibbles: CGIAR, Breeding, Shamba Shape-up, Beach, Plant Cuttings, Cabbage pic, Leaf monitor, European AnGR and PGR, Dutch CWR post-doc, Allium on the Highline, Brazil forest code, Japanese rice in Oz, Indian genebank sell-off, Jersey apple genebank, Hazelnut milk subsitute, SPGRC, Urban veggies roundup, Spicy tales, Agroecological zonation

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Brainfood: Healthy berries, Maghrebi arpicots, Visualizing DNA relationships, Below-ground plant diversity, European apples, Rice storage, Barley movement