Spatial datasets continue to proliferate, and evolve

A few more huge spatial datasets for you this morning, as I deal with jet-lag in a Maryland hotel room at 4 am.

Today there’s a high resolution dataset of the population of Africa. And an analysis of wetland protected areas. 1 And finally a global dataset of particulate matter pollution. This is presented from a human health perspective, but it could have applications in agriculture too.

Bean production environments in East Africa.

I still want to know who’s keeping track of this stuff. Maybe you don’t need to, you can just google as the need arises, but somehow I doubt it. Would love to hear from the CGIAR’s spatial data consortium folks, if they’re listening.

Meanwhile, one of the participants in that consortium has announced that they’re updating one of their iconic products, the now oldish “Atlas of the Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in Africa.”

Bean accessions recorded in Genesys.

How long before they mash it up with that population dataset? And with the data on the location of genebank accessions, for example from Genesys.

Not that it hasn’t been done before, in a very crude way, as you can see in the map in Figure 2 below.

Pavlovsk: you are here

Chaffey’s regular words of wisdom on anything botanical. Well, mostly wise. But more on that later…

That’s from a nibble a few days ago. The qualification concerned Pavlovsk, and Jeremy has now set the record straight. Incidentally, the latest update on the situation from the Vavilov Institute itself has the first decent map of Pavlovsk I’ve seen. Here it is. Explore for yourself: no Street View, alas.

Map of the Pavlovsk Research Station. Yellow: border of the station; Red: border of disputed plots; Green: border of the fruit and berry collection.