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Simply put, a GIS is a computer-based framework that allows different kinds of
information to be geographically tagged ("georeferenced") and displayed together
on a single map. Users can then combine two or more distinct data sets to view
relationships between selected social or biophysical factors—crops, livestock,
forests, soils, waterways, climate, topography, population distribution, income patterns,
education levels, roads, land tenure, administrative boundaries, and so on. GIS thus
provides dynamic tools for analysis and reanalysis, making and remaking maps, mixing and
matching different kinds of information depending on what is of interest.
During the past two decades, GIS applications have revolutionized how scientists use
spatially oriented information. Around the world these tools are now in daily use by
diverse specialists: meteorologists, geologists, hydrologists, economists, demographers,
disaster relief workers, wildlife conservationists, ecologists, foresters, botanists, and
plant breeders, in addition to cartographers and geographers. GIS tools allow these users
to rapidly organize, integrate, and visualize various kinds of biophysical and
socioeconomic data. The resulting electronic maps serve as a workspace for creative
analysis and problem solving.
Agriculture and related natural resources, being spread over a multitude of locations
and elevations around the globe, are intensely spatial in nature, lending themselves well
to GIS analysis. Such analysis helps scientists, planners, policy makers, and others grasp
the complex links between farming and environmental health.
The information used in land-use research and management usually comes from multiple
sources. Typical among them are scientific databases, technical papers, census surveys,
satellite and other remote-sensing images, economic forecasts, and reports of specialized
agencies. Formats are often incompatible, though, or the data may be at different time and
space scales, making comparative analysis difficult. One major strength of GIS is its
ability to integrate and graphically represent such data.
GIS also allows users to push analysis beyond the current "real" state of the
landscape. With modeling tools linked to or integrated with GIS, researchers can simulate
and investigate alternative future states. These may be based on government policy
options, economic growth projections, climate change scenarios, or other variables. Much
of the strength of GIS, then, lies in its ability to tackle questions that begin with
"What if ...?"
CIAT is a leading proponent and user of GIS as tools for untangling the web of social
and biophysical causes and effects at work in the tropical rural landscape. The Center
began assembling its GIS capacity in the mid-1980s. Fortunately, at that time it already
possessed valuable assets with which to build: comprehensive databases on climate, soils,
crops, genetic resources, pests, diseases, and socioeconomic factors in agriculture.
Today, CIAT operates a major state-of-the-art GIS laboratory that brings together,
under a single "virtual roof," three types of resources: trained staff,
databases, and the latest hardware and software. The GIS staff of about 40 scientists,
technicians, and support personnel produce CD-ROMs and provide Internet-based information
products and analysis for agricultural researchers, policy makers, and development
planners around the world. The Center shares information with hundreds of organizations
and works directly with national agencies in Latin America and the Caribbean to build and
apply local expertise in GIS.
Behind the scenes specialists provide a range of technical support services for
CIAT’s GIS applications. These include:
- Management of a large computer infrastructure (spatial databases and state-of-the-art
software and hardware in both Windows NT and UNIX operating system environments)
- Web integration of client services and implementation of data standards
- Map digitizing and scanning
- Photogrammetry, including extraction of digital elevation models (DEMs) from radar
satellite imagery and stereo aerial photographs
- Orthophoto production
- Field surveys and establishment of ground control points, using high-precision global
positioning systems
Laboratory staff work directly with the Center’s other scientists to adapt and
apply GIS tools to diverse areas of research. While some staff are trained in GIS
foundation disciplines like geography, remote sensing, and computer science, others have
migrated there from areas such as ecology, agronomy, forestry, crop physiology, and soil
science.
This wide mix of scientific expertise, combined with that found among non-GIS staff,
allows for innovative synergy in CIAT’s research. Visitors to the Center are just as
likely to find a bean breeder and a crop physiologist working together on a GIS
application as they are to find a geographer sharing a computer screen with a remote
sensing specialist.
Applications of GIS to agricultural research and related areas of rural development are
limited only by the human imagination and by the quality and resolution of available data.
CIAT is actively developing and using GIS for diverse purposes:
- Mapping poverty and its social and environmental cofactors
- Environmental monitoring, assessment, and application of sustainability indicators
- Land-use planning at several political levels and geographic scales
- Predicting locations of wild relatives of cultivated crops and other organisms
- Analyzing genetic variation in plant species
- Disaster relief
- Crop modeling
- Germplasm targeting
- Mapping crop pests and diseases
- Research impact assessment
In addition, CIAT collaborates with other international networks and centers to
implement spatial information standards and share GIS methods.
This section profiles selected GIS applications by CIAT, recent or on-going, under five
themes: (1) poverty mapping and disaster relief, (2)
environmental monitoring, (3) participatory land use planning, (4) bioprospecting and germplasm conservation, and (4) integrated pest management.
Understanding poverty—especially who is poor and why—is a critical first step
in designing development services for those most in need. In Peru CIAT has worked with the
country’s National Statistics and Census Institute (INEI) to make agricultural and
census data more useful in the fight against rural poverty. Using data from a Peruvian
survey of 5,000 households in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon, collaborating
specialists created a GIS that allows users to analyze causal links between poverty
("unmet basic needs"), agricultural production trends, and the state of the
environment.
With support from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), CIAT has also worked with national authorities in Honduras to
design poverty indicators based on data from a national census covering 900,000
households. The indicators were linked to a socioeconomic and biophysical atlas of the
country that CIAT released on CD-ROM in 1998. The results was a detailed picture of the
spatial distribution of poverty—right down to the municipal level.
Going a step further, CIAT staff have used GIS techniques to help add a new dimension
to poverty profiling, namely incorporating poor people’s own perceptions of their
"well-being" into indicators. In this case GIS analysis identified a
cross-section of poor Honduran communities in which participatory research could be
carried out with local people. This ensured that a sample of villages with contrasting
biophysical and socioeconomic traits was selected for the study so that results could be
extrapolated to the national level.
When Hurricane Mitch struck Honduras, Nicaragua, and other parts of Central America in
late 1998, CIAT’s databases, familiarity with Central America, and GIS expertise were
quickly pressed into service in the relief effort. Radar satellite images of the
devastated areas were processed by Canadian experts using CIAT ground reference data.
Center scientists then loaded the resulting information into the Honduras electronic atlas
for use in damage assessment. They also added pertinent data on crop production, locations
of institutions, and sources of drinking water. Within a week Center staff had a set of
emergency maps for use by relief agencies. Several weeks later, the "Mitch
Atlas" was widely distributed on CD-ROM in collaboration with the US Geological
Survey (USGS) and Environmental Systems
Research Institute (ESRI). CIAT staff
also contributed to a second GIS tool with wider geographic coverage, the Digital Atlas of
Central America: Prepared in Response to Hurricane Mitch, which was copublished by the
USGS, ESRI, and CIAT.
An indispensable task in hurricane relief was rapid multiplication and distribution of
seed to farmers. Some 60 percent of the combined farmland area of Honduras and Nicaragua
was severely damaged by the flooding and landslides. Many communities lost entire crops of
beans and maize, threatening their livelihoods and food security. In response CIAT and
three other international research centers launched an emergency project called Seeds of
Hope for Central America. The Mitch Atlas, with its detailed data on crop types and
locations, proved highly valuable in targeting seed distribution to the neediest
agricultural communities.
This is an area of intense CIAT collaboration with numerous partner organizations. One
recent product of the work is a powerful information tool kit, featuring a CD-ROM called
Rural Sustainability Indicators for Central America. The first product of its kind for any
region of the world, the information package gives decision makers an unprecedented
ability to analyze problems in development and the environment, determine their causes,
and weigh the consequences of different courses of action.
Published in a bilingual English/Spanish version, the product resulted from a 2-year
project carried out jointly by CIAT, the World Bank, and the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP). Financial support was
provided by the governments of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The indicators tool was
developed through a collaborative process, involving 6 regional and 50 national
institutions. All took part in extensive consultations, workshops, and training events.
The indicators tool includes 11 indices that help analyze development and environmental
problems; 68 "core" indicators for determining the causes and effects of these
problems; and 114 "complementary" indicators that help apply the analysis to
decision making. The tool will enable decision makers not just to analyze past and present
problems but to explore future possibilities. With a "spatial land-use model"
developed at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, users can explore the potential
impact of specific policies, strategies, and actions under different scenarios, such as
"business as usual," "natural disasters," or "sustainable rural
development."
The new product for Central America builds on the foundation laid by a previous
CIAT/UNEP project, which led to Latin America's first computerized environmental and
sustainability indicators atlas in 1998. Like that product, the Central America tool kit
draws largely on information already available, though its level of detail and power of
analysis are greater.
A related domain of GIS work is the exploration of new land-use opportunities,
especially for agricultural development. CIAT has worked intensively at five reference
sites in Central and South America, representing three different agroecosystems: savannas
(the Orinoco region of Colombia), hillsides (Honduras, Nicaragua, and southwestern
Colombia), and forest margins (Peru). Here we look at recent work in the Colombian
savannas.
In the expansive Orinoco region, CIAT has established partnerships with decision makers
at four administrative levels of government: the region, department, municipality, and
village. The work started in January 1999 and is funded by the Colombian Ministry of
Agriculture and Rural Development.
Colombia’s official land-use planning process is an interlocking exercise. Each
administrative level, starting with municipalities, submits its plans as an input to the
next level up. While the CIAT project makes GIS tools and expertise available for
individual planning exercises, it is also encouraging the overall flow of spatial
information, in compatible formats, between the various planning levels.
The approach promoted by CIAT begins with the formulation of a common vision for the
area targeted by the planning exercise—what various stakeholders would like to see in
5 to 10 years. A diagnosis is then made by comparing actual conditions with desired ones
and attempting to explain why there may be gaps between them. Next, collective actions,
including adjustments in current land use, are planned. At this stage goals must be made
more precise and adjusted in light of the land’s suitability for the intended uses as
well as socioeconomic factors like accessibility to markets and labor availability. Once
the desired land use has been mapped out and the planning is complete, progress is
monitored via a set of measurable indicators. These are used to track actions and any
changes in the conditions that were described at the beginning of the exercise.
GIS analyses contribute to several aspects of the planning and follow-up work. They are
used to describe actual conditions, to fine-tune goals through land suitability and
constraints analysis, and to monitor progress. The planning approach is not based solely
on land evaluation techniques; rather, these serve as an intermediate step.
The approach has been developed with decision makers in Orinoco and is being tested in
their land-use planning exercises. Some GIS tools have been developed and are
progressively being improved; others are still under development. A planning exercise has
been successfully completed with the municipality of Puerto López. The Plan de
Ordenamiento Territorial (POT), which is required by law and serves as the municipal-level
policy on land use and municipal development, is now entering the monitoring phase.
Planning exercises with five villages within the municipality are also well advanced.
Since the cost of GIS software can be a real obstacle to the adoption of GIS-related
tools and methods at all administrative levels, CIAT helped fund the production of a
simplified, Spanish-language version of MapMaker Pro, a low-cost British commercial
software program. Called MapMaker Popular, the Spanish version is now distributed free of
charge over the Internet, from CIAT’s Web site. An accompanying Spanish-language
training guide, developed by the CIAT team, is likewise available.
The CIAT project currently benefits a specific group of Colombian land-use planners and
communities. But it is also generating valuable knowledge about which mixes of data, GIS
tools, and conceptual approaches work best for land-use analysis at various geographic
scales, from the village on up. Other countries and regions thus stand to benefit from the
pioneering GIS work being done in savannas of Colombia’s Orinoco.
4. Bioprospecting and Germplasm Conservation
Collecting, describing, and preserving specimens of wild plants and other organisms is
a venerable art requiring meticulous attention to detail. It has been practiced for
centuries by itinerant or curious farmers, traditional healers, and explorers. More
recently, it has become a domain dominated by biologists, horticulturalists, herbarium
curators, pharmaceutical companies, and plant breeders.
Bioprospectors, whether they are interested in mammals, insects, plants or other
organisms, have traditionally needed strong legs and enormous patience to cover vast
tracts of land in the pursuit of elusive quarry. Their success has often been based on
educated hunches and sometimes on serendipity–being in the right place at the right
time to make an unexpected discovery.
FloraMap® is a CIAT-designed software tool that eliminates much of the guesswork,
legwork, and costs typically involved in tracking down wild plant species and other
organisms of potential use to researchers. Developed, tested, and refined over the past
two decades, this Windows-based tool relies on climatic data to predict promising
collection sites.
Now available on CD-ROM, FloraMap is designed especially for situations where a wild
plant or other organism has already been collected from multiple sites but where little is
known about its physiology. All that is needed to run the program is the latitude,
longitude, and altitude of each site from which the original set of specimens (or
"accessions") was collected. These are the raw data that FloraMap uses to
produce probability maps showing where else in the tropical world the species might be
found.
Agricultural scientists are increasingly interested in the wild relatives of cultivated
crops, because they harbor genes that could be useful in breeding better crop varieties.
Disease and pest resistance, drought tolerance, and better yield are just a few of the
traits that wild plants may have to offer their domesticated cousins. But scientists are
also interested in other life forms, such as insects, fungi, and viruses. Studying their
physiology, life cycles, and genetic makeup can furnish important clues as to how such
organisms help or hinder crop growth and health.
FloraMap is predicated on the idea that climate is a robust indicator of the
environmental range of plants and other organisms. Likely alternative sites for finding a
particular species are those whose climate profiles closely match those of the original
locations where the wild accessions were collected. FloraMap predicts these sites with the
aid of an extensive, georeferenced tropical climate database compiled over many years by
CIAT.
In one recent application, a Mexican researcher investigating passion fruit
(Passiflora) as part of an international project found a wild species in southern Colombia
based on a prediction from FloraMap. The species had not previously been identified and
recorded in that region by scientists.
While FloraMap is mainly a tool for predicting new collection sites to provide raw
material for plant breeding, it has other important applications. For example, it can be
used by plant genetic resource specialists to plan more efficient in situ conservation
programs. Or it can identify locations where promising species might be cultivated by
farmers or tested in field trials. Both these alternatives are currently being examined in
relation to tropical grasses and legumes.
CIAT tropical forage scientists have built up a considerable germplasm bank and
database. They are now using FloraMap in combination with road maps to determine
climatically suitable sites for conserving forage species in convenient locations--close
to roads. They are also exploring the suitability of FloraMap and other tools to target
promising forage species, such as the legume Arachis pintoi (a wild Brazilian plant in the
peanut family), on suitable farming communities. The latter work takes into account both
biophysical and socioeconomic factors, such as adaptation of various species to local
climate and soils, milk and meat marketing opportunities, and the potential benefits to
poor people. Central America is the initial focus of this work, with Africa to follow
later.
The aim here is provide national research programs, development projects, and NGOs with
a menu of forage technologies useful to their client farmers. Interactive tools to analyze
germplasm options will eventually be available both on CD-ROM and directly on the
Internet. In the same vein, CIAT scientists are using GIS methods to target bean varieties
to farming communities in Latin America, based on the results of regional trials.
GIS tools have also proved valuable in studying whitefly, one of the most serious and
growing threats to tropical agriculture. One species in particular, Bemisia tabaci, not
only directly damages crops by sucking sap from foliage but also transmits geminiviruses
that cause devastating diseases in many crops.
Soybeans, tomatoes, and cotton are especially vulnerable to whitefly. While common
beans, an important protein-rich staple in Latin America, are not a primary host crop of
the pest, they are especially vulnerable as secondary targets on mixed farms where
different crop species are grown in close proximity. The same holds for increasingly
important cash crops like squash, watermelon, cucumbers, and peppers.
As part of the global Whitefly Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Project, CIAT
researchers are using FloraMap and other tools to learn more about the whitefly’s
distribution, by species and biotype, and about the topographical and climatic conditions
that favor outbreaks. By assigning more or less weight to recorded whitefly infestation
sites, depending on the severity of the outbreak, IPM specialists can use FloraMap to
predict future hot spots.
CIAT scientists note that easier visualization of whitefly-related data in space and
time, made possible through GIS maps, is helping to ring alarm bells in the international
development community about the global threat posed by this pest. Recent mapping of
geminivirus outbreaks in tomatoes clearly traces a dangerous pattern of whitefly
penetration in Latin America and the Caribbean over the past 25 years. In the 1970s only a
few areas, especially southeast Brazil, western Mexico’s coastal region, and southern
Chile, were seriously affected. By the mid-1990s, the situation had worsened considerably,
with outbreaks also being recorded in Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa
Rica, some Caribbean Islands, and the southern US state of Florida. While GIS tools can
help scientists make better predictions, they also serve to raise public awareness about
the whitefly menace and add a measure of objectivity to the task of selecting priority
research sites.
As described above, CIAT works closely with national agencies in developing and
applying GIS tools. In an effort to systematically build local GIS capacity in Central
America, CIAT coordinates a major project, called "Pro-SIG," with funding from
the InfoDev program at the World Bank. Our main partner in this work is the Tropical
Agricultural Center for Research and Higher Education (CATIE), based in Costa Rica.
Despite the growing complexity of agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean in
response to the forces of globalization, countries in the region lag behind other nations
in the use of georeferenced data for agricultural planning. The Pro-SIG project aims to
improve the situation by helping government information providers to create new products
and services for sale to the agricultural user community and to set up information-sharing
networks. Participating countries link their census and other statistical data on
agriculture to digital maps using GIS programs. The idea is to enrich these information
sources and make them more user-friendly for market research, economic analysis and
planning, and environmental impact assessment.
Consultation and training are integral to the project. CIAT has helped national
participants assess their hardware and software needs, advised them on equipment
importation, and surveyed their core data sets. In September 1999 a training workshop at
CIAT brought together 18 professionals from six countries. Participants learned about Web
site development, spatial data standards, GIS software options, mapping technology, data
capture, relational databases, geoprocessing, three-dimensional terrain modeling, and
remote sensing. They also got hands-on experience with CIAT-developed GIS tools.
Participants from each country are now planning new products and services for their
client, such as population and environmental atlases, project databases, and planning
tools.
In another effort to foment international cooperation in GIS, CIAT plays an active role
in the Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI). Founded in 1999, the consortium is a global network of 12
research centers and laboratories that use GIS technologies for land management,
sustainable agriculture, and poverty alleviation. Like CIAT, most of the other
participating organizations are supported by the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
Major aims of CSI are to standardize data sets within the CGIAR centers and to
collaborate on methods and solutions in GIS-based agricultural research at the global,
regional, and local levels. For each of six themes, a CSI member is designated as the
coordinating center. These themes are data management and tools; geographic dimensions of
crop varieties; impact assessment; degradation of natural resources; training of
national-level agricultural researchers; and poverty mapping.
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