Generation Atlas
Oct 1st, 2011 | By Glenn Hyman | Category: Impact, Targeting Impact
We presented a poster on the “Generation Atlas” online map server at the General Research Meeting of the Generation Challenge Program, Sept 21-25, in Hyderabad, India
Generation Atlas
Glenn Hyman and Ernesto Giron
International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Cali, Colombia;
Geographic information science supports crop improvement in a number of ways and scientists are increasingly taking advantage of the technology. Yet the technology remains beyond the reach of
many professionals who have not had the opportunity to master GIS software programs and the methodologies employed. Generation Atlas seeks to bring spatial information and analysis to a broader
group of crop improvement specialists working in the Generation Challenge Program. The tool provides data and some simple analysis capabilities aimed at evaluating the geographic context within which
crop improvement takes place. The Atlas is an online map server built on ESRI technology. It includes map layers related to GCP focus crops, countries and farming systems. Available information emphasizes
production constraints that are the focus of GCP research, such as drought, soil properties and socioeconomic conditions. Several tools support simple queries of drought conditions at a site and across the globe. Tools are available to evaluate conditions at sites or trials sites that are part of phenotyping networks. The data sets are all publicly available for use in standard GIS software packages.
Related GCP project–G8009.06.05/ Activity 3.2.5: Phenotyping sites and screening protocols (Activity Leader: Xavier Delannay, GCP)



[...] Agriculture & Food Security, do keep up. [↩]No, don’t ask me how it relates to this. [↩]Not that it would have been easy. You can’t really share the AMKN maps. [↩] [...]
Dear Back in Baku…..if you go to http://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/egiron/GenerationAtlas/ and then click on DATA AVAILABILITY >> LOAD EXTENSION, it will take you to the data availability page where you can find links to the data. Hope this helps….
G
Thanks, Glenn. It might well help, but on my browser (Chrome), when I get to Data Avalilability I see no Load Extension option. And anyway, how is anyone supposed to know where to go? Incidentally, may I take this opportunity to ask why access to the global public goods on the germplasm map “requires permission from Elizabeth Arnaud”?
thanks luigi….that’s odd….i use chrome too and it seems to work fine….but we will look into this. Regarding the germplasm map, we just did this kind of as a pilot. The problem is that we now only have the accession numbers. But we are going to begin to work with some different people in bioversity to get a lot more data. We should probably take this off the site until we get something fully fleshed out. We have a meeting on Monday with the Bioversity guys, so hopefully we will get it sorted out.
Thanks, Glenn. I’ve check again and I just don’t see the Load Extension thing. It’s probably just me being useless. On the germplasm map, it’s good that you’re talking to Bioversity about the data, but strictly speaking you don;t really need to. Just go to Genesys and get the data you want! That’s what it is there for!
I think Ernesto is going to contact you about this….
Dear Luigi,
Another way to reach the Data Availability page, is selecting the menu option in the upper right corner or going directly at http://gismap.ciat.cgiar.org/egiron/GenerationAtlas/data.html
About germplasm map and the Genesys source data, you can be sure we are going to get the data but it would be better if we can use it from the site without download it, avoiding duplication and staying updated and synchronized.
Thanks for your comments.
PS: You can try to clear your browser cache and load the Generation Atlas web page again…
Thanks, Ernesto. I have no difficulty getting to the data availability page. But once there I don;t see the Load Extension option that Glenn mentioned. But don’t worry about it. I have forgotten why I’m doing this!
I think that my name was added when we did this prototype while ago. i did not mentioned to ICRISAT that we were reusing their SINGER data on the Atlas to populate the prototype. But this can be removed now as i think they would not mind much.