- Remnant genetic diversity detected in an ancient crop: Triticum dicoccon Schrank landraces from Asturias, Spain. Strong geographic differentiation even at small scales.
- Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus): Is there a case for further crop improvement? Yes, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they.
- Highly polymorphic nSSR markers: A useful tool to assess origin of North African cultivars and to provide additional proofs of secondary grapevine domestication events. North African cultivars do not derive from North African wild strains. Did anyone really think they did? Well, I guess it’s good to have the data.
- Building the niche through time: using 13,000 years of data to predict the effects of climate change on three tree species in Europe. You have to take into account past distributions when predicting future ones.
Finding your way in the agricultural spatial data jungle
The recent announcement of a major rethink for the HarvestChoice website sent me on a voyage of discovery. Remember that HarvestChoice, “a partnership between IFPRI and the University of Minnesota, generates knowledge products that help guide strategic investments to improve the well-being of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa through more productive and profitable farming.” That classically includes maps. And there are definitely a lot of spatial datasets on the site. And in Mappr there is a potentially useful online tool for combining different layers and summarizing the results. No doubt a valuable site.
But let me focus here on a separate issue, and that is whether the resources available globally to develop and present such data, in such sites, are being used, er, optimally. The question occurred to me when, in exploring the maps available at HarvestChoice, I came across a dataset labelled “Cattle population (head) (2005).” The source for the data is helpfully provided:
HarvestChoice/IFPRI 2010/FAO. 2007. Gridded livestock of the world 2007, by G.R.W. Wint and T.P. Robinson. Rome, pp 131.
The funding agency is given as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and data availability is described as follows:
Data available for download in CSV format. Spatial data layer may be explored using MAPPR and downloaded in geoTIFF and ASCII raster formats.
Now, the 2007 FAO publication referenced as the source of the data is downloadable as a pdf from FAO. But the data are also available in a variety of formats from the FAO Animal Production and Health Division website. Among the formats FAO (and only FAO) offers is a Google Earth file, which is probably going to be the most useful for the average user.
And then there’s ILRI. Map 4 in their monumental Mapping Poverty and Livestock in the Developing World of 2002 does not look too dissimilar to the above, though it may be based on older data. It’s a pdf, of course, but for all I know the data are also available in a more useable format somewhere on the ILRI website. I can’t be sure because their database of GIS datasets is just too clunky to spend any significant time struggling with, frankly. Which is not to say that I didn’t…
So what exactly has HarvestChoice added to the sum total of human happiness by making “Cattle population (head) (2005)” available on its website, above and beyond FAO’s contribution? I’m really hard put to say. The datasets are easier to use in Google Earth from FAO’s website than in any format provided by IFPRI, in my opinion. And the basic analyses available in Mappr will probably be useful to some, sure, but since sharing the map itself is tricky from there, you still have to got to FAO for that.
So the poor user probably has to navigate at least two separate and quite different websites to get all she needs. One wonders whether the donors behind all of these different efforts to provide data on cattle population numbers around the world (if indeed there were more than one, apart from the aforementioned Gates Foundation) considered that before green-lighting the projects. And, of course, that’s just cattle numbers. Life is just way too short for me to plough through all the other datasets at HarvestChoice looking for overlaps like these, but I’d be willing to bet this is not an isolated example. We know that crop distribution data is also out there in all sorts of different places, forms and formats. And, in fact, there’s some evidence of balkanization in other types of livestock data too. I’m not saying it’s hell out there for spatial data in agriculture, on a par with Genebank Database Hell. But it is definitely a bit of a jungle.
Does it matter? I don’t know. Maybe the users of these types of data really like having multiple websites to visit for downloading and visualization. Maybe the funds involved in developing all these different datasets and websites are minimal anyway. I’d really like to hear from the people involved at HarvestChoice, FAO and ILRI (are there other players?). But is there even a forum in which these guys meet to discuss data issues? Because if there were, and I by some miracle were to be invited to it, what I would say is that what I would prefer is a single place to go for cattle population numbers maps and the like (e.g. crop production data), with lots of options for exporting the raw data for use in my own GIS, the ability to import and combine my own datasets online, and some elegant ways of sharing the results. ((Take a look at this, for example. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I like the sharing options.)) That, for me, would be value for money. And I can’t believe I’m alone in that.
Mapping nutrition research
The Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (www.lcirah.ac.uk) and the University of Aberdeen are embarking on an interesting project for the UK’s Department for International Development.
The objective of the project is to map the growing research activity on agricultural interventions to improve nutrition in low-middle income countries and identify “gaps” in current and anticipated research.
You might like to consider contributing information if you are undertaking or planning research with a
focus on an interaction between agriculture and nutrition, such as agricultural interventions to improve nutrition and their evaluation, the influence of agricultural practices and food value chains on nutrition, governance and policy processes through which agriculture and nutrition are linked, and links between agricultural productivity and/or growth and nutrition at a macro scale etc.
The people to contact are Corinna Hawkes (corinnahawkes “at” o2.co.uk) and/or Rachel Turner (rachel.turner “at” lshtm.ac.uk). It could be your research, or research you know about. Or indeed relevant networks (mailing lists, online fora, communities of practice) you participate in.
No doubt someone will eventually mash up the results with all the clever maps now available on HarvestChoice‘s recently revamped website.
The cutting-edge MAPPR, for example, enables users to pick and choose among hundreds of “layers” of map-based information about all aspects of smallholder agriculture in Africa—from poverty to rainfall—and make customized maps and summary tables.
But more on that tomorrow. Stay tuned…
LATER: It occurs to the blogger, belatedly, that “to map” has more than one meaning. Ooops.
Mapping some life
Yes, indeed Map of Life is indeed live, as we Nibbled yesterday, at least for amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. ((Coincidentally, there were also two pieces on the tubes yesterday about the threats to fish that it occurred to me might benefit from the kind of aggregation of data that MoL does. But anyway.)) MoL pulls in point data from GBIF, of course, but also polygon distribution maps from IUCN, user-uploaded maps, local inventories from various sources and the regional checklists from WWF. That’s a whole load of different sources, formats and types of data to be served up in one googly visualization. Quite impressive. Which does make one wonder why one is reduced to screengrabs to share the results, as for example below for the yak and Dall’s Sheep, two of the high altitude mammals we featured a few days back. No doubt they’ll sort that out.
And we of course also look forward to the inclusion of plants, and in particular crop wild relatives, in the near future. We can point them to some data sources for those…
Nibbles: Mapping Life, PES, Quinoa, Forest restoration
- Mapping Life is live. Will livestock and crops eventually be there?
- How Valuing Nature Can Transform Agriculture. Errr … dunno. Is this really brainfodder?
- A humble agronomist considers the de-commoditisation of quinoa in Bolivia.
- Bioversity says that forest restoration should make better use of genetic diversity.