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Mapping drought risk

Just a quick follow-up to the rhyming couplet on water-related stresses in the just-published Brainfood. The Center for Hazards and Risks Research (CHRR) at Columbia University, which we have mentioned here before in connection with tsunami risk, also has data on Global Drought Hazard Distribution.

With a little R-related effort by Robert 1 you can get a Google Earth file, which looks like this for Asia. 2 I’ve also added MODIS fire hotspots for the past 24 hours, merely because I can. That would be the little fire icons.

And that means you can mash up drought risk with germplasm origin (from Genesys, say), in this case from Chad as an example.

Which is a great thing to be able to do because as we have just had reconfirmed by our friend Dag Endresen, the origin of germplasm allows you to make some predictions about its performance.

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Brainfood: Chia, Lentils, Bambara groundnut, Cacao, Amaranths, Rwanda, Cherimoya, Conservation, Drought, Plasticity, Phenology

And here are a trio of rhyming couplets, if you see what I mean:

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Nutritionist tells researchers what to eat shock

According to a report over at the Vaviblog, Bioversity’s nutritionist Jessica Fanzo was beset by questioners after her talk at the Vavilov Institute mentioned both the bad nutritional status of most Russians and the high nutritional value of some fruits and berries at the threatened Pavlovsk Experiment Station. She was bombarded with requests for advice. The Vaviblog’s correspondent reports:

One response stuck in my mind. Jessica was asked whether one couldn’t get all the vitamins and minerals one needs from pills. She said yes, but you have to get everything else from food, so why not the vitamins as well, by choosing your food better?

Especially if you like your potatoes processed and potable.

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How much spending goes on food?

There’s an interactive map at Civil Eats, which is great as far as it goes. But does it go far enough? Almost all of Africa is a vast gray expanse of “no data”. Where’s the companion map that shows what percent of a person’s diet they grow themselves?

There’s also an interesting statement in the comments: “Life expectancy is higher in some nations that spend above 10% on foods.” Mash-up artists, Gapminder mavens, what are you waiting for?

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Featured: Genebank Data

Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, Curator of IRRI’s genebank, offers some insights into germplasm documentation and the necessary conversations, and brings up an important caution:

[I]t is a common mantra to call for recipients to return data “to add to the store of information the genebank has on its accessions”. Be careful you don’t encourage genebank curators to attach recipient’s data to their own accessions. That would be wrong. You have to keep the data associated with the recipient’s germplasm, and link their germplasm back to the genebank accession. You need also to know and record the nature of that link. For example, how did they choose the plant to genotype, and how likely is it to be typical of the original heterogeneous accession?

The ICIS mantra is that’s why we use ICIS, not a traditional genebank database. Traditional genebank databases don’t allow you to define links between the genebank’s accession and the recipient’s sample, so you can’t do what you want. If you seriously want to connect recipients’ info back to the accessions, you’d better think seriously about incorporating germplasm tracking into GRIN and Genesys.

ICIS, in case you were wondering, is the International Crop Information System. There are different implementations for different crops. I don’t know whether they talk to each other or to anything else.