Since becoming available in June 2011, the on-line and stand-alone versions of the MarkSim GCM stochastic weather generator tool have been widely tested. A few problems were found, which have now been corrected.

A new series of workshops in the Decision and Policy Analysis Program (DAPA) at CIAT have the aim to share knowledge and experiences among DAPA employees and visiting scientists, help facilitate connections between different research programs and areas at CIAT and with other external institutions, and build capacity for DAPA personnel in the use of relevant
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If a crop were a film star, what would cassava be?  Well a month ago we established that cassava was a Rambo root – very difficult to kill.  It’s well known resistance to drought and heat was shown to stand up to climate change in our paper in Tropical Plant Biology.  Most interesting in that
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Being an agricultural researcher –particularly if you have ever investigated the abiotic controls on plant growth – it’s very likely that you have come across the problem of finding appropriate weather data. This is particularly true when (a) you don’t work in an institution that has its own weather station(s); (b) you’re not well connected enough to get data from close colleagues for free; (c) you don’t have enough budget to purchase the data you need from other institutions; or (d) a combination of all the above occurs.

Climate analogues have been unleashed on the world today with the publication of our working paper on the methodology, and an online interface to run the model.  It’s already been picked up by a number of other websites, including Nature’s News Blog, Voice of America and SciDev.net.  Developed in partnership between CCAFS, CIAT’s DAPA program,
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Last week a new paper was on-line published in the journal Food Security based on a study lead by the Decision and Policy Analysis Program (DAPA)’s  researchers in collaboration with the Cassava Entomology area of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) . The study applies Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) to highlight potential geographical shifts
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Prolific is the word I’d use to describe DAPA’s contribution to a new book entitled Crop Adaptation to Climate Change which is soon to be released by Wiley.  The table of contents are now online, and the book is in the final throes of being published.  DAPA’s contribution has been in no less than seven chapters.
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Following a recent blogpost by our colleagues of the Markets and Supply Chains Research,there’s a visualisation tool where all the economic indicators of agricultural production can be displayed and analysed as both charts and maps. Production for food, feed and biofuel are taken into account, as well as trade, population growth, per capita income and
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The importance of adaption of agriculture to changing conditions has been depicted as the most important issue for human sustainability. Not only the IPCC, but every single author in the scientific literature depicts agriculture as one of the key sectors under the context of climate change. Throughout the world, agriculture is not only part of
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We’re here in Nairobi, Kenya, in the “Multi-site trial database for climate change analysis: Planning and launch Workshop”.  This is an activity being developed by Theme 5 of the Challenge Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, and we have BIG ambitions! We’re coining the phrase Open Access Agriculture, and the philosophy is that
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