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Reaching out to farmers, agronomists and plant breeders

with spatially efficient, participatory testing networks

Glenn Hyman, Pierre Sibiry Traore, Kai Sonder, Juan Arista, Jawoo Koo

The Africa Trial Sites Catalogue

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The poor performance of public institutions in disseminatingimproved varieties to small-scale farmers is broadly accepted,and there is an urgent need to design and test new

institutional arrangements ..

World Bank Development Report 2007

Cultivar testing is a key element in the process ofdelivering varieties to farmersMulti Environment Trials (MET) and GxE analysis havea rich history going back 100+ years

Trial networks for the cereal crops have beenespecially effective in the past

BUT

WE KNOW THAT:

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A solution to improve efficiency of breeding programs

through better availability and exchange of information:

Create an interactive website that allows breeders, researchers, extensionistsand other people interested in improving crops and getting better access to themto look for information on trial sites and cultivar evaluations.

Tools allow to identify those sites in Africa that are most similar to ones place ofinterest or work

Provide location specific data (climate, edaphic, contact) for all trial sites

Provide access to results from evaluation trials

Provide contact info and links to online seed ordering services from genebanks

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300+ crop

evaluation sitesare currentlyrepresented inAFRICATS

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Homologue layers for all sites show representativeness of sites

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Homologue tool compares any station with all others

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And giveslist of 10most similar

stations topoint ofinterest

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Links to breeding programs and gene banks

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Partners canenter newstations anddata as well asedit existingones

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Africats incorporatesthe GenerationChallenge Programs

drought timing tool

Supports trial site

planning for cultivarstolerant to drought

Includes waterbalance modelimplemented in

Fortran (Peter Jones),Google maps, andArcGIS server.

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Africats incorporatestools developed forthe HarvestChoiceproject (Jawoo Koo)

Supports queries of

climate data from theWorldclim database

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Tool for identifying importantcrops around a trial site

Uses the IFPRI SPAM model user-defined radius of the

buffer area Google maps ArcGIS Server

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FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS:

1.CIAT secured new funding from the climate change challengeprogram (courtesy of Andy Jarvis)

2.New crops: will engage other CGIAR centers not yet involved

3.Expansion to Latin America and Asia (will build identical sites)

4.Well hire a dedicated application/Web developer (as opposedto a student intern)

5.Andy Farrow will lead side meeting in the coming days