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Global system for monitoring vegetation disturbance launched

The redoubtable Mongabay.com has just announced the beta version of the Global Forest Disturbance Alert System (GloF-DAS). How it works is that four times a year (at the end of March, June, September and December) the CASA ecosystem modeling team at the NASA Ames Research Center produce something called the “Quarterly Indicator of Cover Change” (QUICC). This compares global vegetation index images from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from exactly a year before with the ones they just got. GloF-DAS then takes the QUICC data and maps the location of forest disturbance as the center points of 5×5 km areas where there was a >40% loss of forest greenness cover over the previous 12 months.

Here’s the result for Europe, for the year period ending March 2012.

There’s some issue I’d take with this approach. Most importantly, comparing March with March is not necessarily comparing vegetation at the same level of seasonal development in the temperate zone. But I think this is a great step forward in developing a global system for monitoring threats of genetic erosion. As the developers point out:

The cause(s) of any forest disturbance point detected in this map has yet to be confirmed.

Disturbance locations and impacts are subject to verification through local observations.

So imagine a next iteration of the system where local observers can annotate some of those potential disturbance points. A bit like what happens in the National Phenology Network in the USA, though for a different purpose. 1 And information will flow out more freely too.

In coming months, GloF-DAS will offer an alert system whereby users can sign up to get notifications via email or SMS text message on recent changes in forest cover for a specified location or country.

Of course, for this to be truly a game-changer we who are interested in monitoring threats to crop wild relatives, say, would need the ability to combine the potential threat data of GloF-DAS with our own data on species occurrence or diversity. It doesn’t look to me like that’s possible just now, but perhaps it is something that we as a community can suggest to the developers.

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Agrobiodiversity education in context

A piece on “Generating the next generation” by Nigel Chaffey in his latest, always indispensable, Plant Cuttings had me trawling around for an hour or so last night amid botanical teaching resources, looking for stuff that might be relevant to agricultural biodiversity. It’s not a great haul, alas.

Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, published by the American Society of Plant Biologists, does have Genetic Improvements in Agriculture, but it’s behind a subscription wall. The American Society of Plant Biologists has pages of resources for K-12 and higher education, but the focus seems to be on biotechnology. Fortunately, the Plant Science TREE (Tool for Research Engaged Education), from the Gatsby Plant Science Summer Schools, does have a useful, freely available section on Plants and People.

I was also momentarily encouraged by seeing an old friend posing in his rice genebank on the homepage of Science & Plants for Schools website:

But the caption he is lumbered with is, weirdly, about the role of plant sciences in “developing cures for diseases.” And anyway nothing happens when you click on him. However, feeding the world is also mentioned (phew), and I was in the end able to find something on genebanks and plant breeding. I wouldn’t call the coverage comprehensive, though. Nor systematically presented.

There is, of course, a place for teaching resources specifically for agrobiodiversity, but one would like to see the subject a little better integrated into the wider plant sciences education universe. Wouldn’t one? Well, not if there are many students like Katie DeGroot.

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Sunflower guru bags medal

I don’t see it on its website yet, but the Linnean Society of London has just awarded the prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal ‪to Loren Rieseberg, according to Twitter traffic. Dr Riesberg is an expert on sunflower genetics and evolution, and has done much pioneering work on the wild relatives. As luck would have it, I interviewed him recently about his work, and you can listen to the result here. Congratulations to Loren.

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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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Featured: Online mapping

Cédric Jeanneret-Grosjean thinks he knows why a couple of online mapping tools made me cry recently:

About your patience running out, you can’t really blame the “geeks”. I think the culprits in these initiative (customised online-web map portals two-O and variants) are the bored, misdirected info-comm-know managers and officers wanting such a tool on their corporate website.

Why don’t you tell us what you really think, Cédric? It’s a long comment, but well worth reading in full. And many thanks to Cédric for taking the time to respond to the post.