Blog entries filtered by: Agroecology

Jason Beddow of HarvestChoice and the University of Minnesota, along with Darren Kriticos of CSIRO, explain how HarvestChoice is revolutionizing the science of tracking -- and predicting -- the paths of devastating crop pests and diseases such as UG99.

SPAM2000 (any version) is based on a large set of data which centers as much as possible on the year 2000: land cover / land use (Boston University’s MODIS-derived land cover 2000 and JRC’s GLC2000), crop suitability (Global AEZ Zones 2000 by FAO and IIASA), irrigated areas (FAO and CESR of University of Kassel), population density (CIESIN), and, most importantly, national and sub-national crops statistics for 2000.

HarvestChoice uses a so-called meso-scale spatial grid typically at 10km or 5-arc minute resolution.

Long-term yield trials are great resources for agricultural researches in multiple disciplines, but such dataset have not been readily available in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Hatfield Experimental Farm in Pretoria, South Africa, is an exceptional case that has been providing maize yield and fertilizer trial dataset with 32 treatments since 1939. In collaboration with University of Pretoria, HarvestChoice facilitated the re-discovery of raw yield dataset from the trial to study the measured long-term yield variability.