Spatial patterns in socioeconomic data reveal issues and trends that would otherwise be missed by data aggregation to political or other units. Geographic Information System (GIS) tools provide display and analysis capabilities that are underutilized by many social scientists. The present article combines field-based surveys that maintain locational information with GIS tools to examine gender roles, responsibilities, and workloads in a spatial context for a case-study watershed in Nepal. Adult women outworked men by an average of 3.8 hours per day.

Although soil fertility is recognized as a primary constraint to agricultural production in developing countries, use of fertilizer in Sub-Saharan Africa is declining. Smallholder farmers still rely heavily on livestock manure for soil fertility management. To explore the determinants of soil fertility management practices, including both the use of cattle manure and inorganic fertilizer, data are used from a sample of 3,330 geo-referenced farm households across Central and Western Kenya. A bivariate probit model is applied to jointly examine the use of the two technologies.

In the Senegal river floodplain, irrigated agriculture and traditional flood recession crops (mainly sorghum) coexist. The latter depends upon the extent of the annual flood, which is partly a function of the amount of water released from the upstream Manantali reservoir. Even though recession sorghum yield is clearly smaller than that of irrigated rice, this production system, because it covers a large area, is a major contributor to total food production in Podor and Matam departments. It is therefore important to quantify areas and yields.

The precise estimation of surface runoff from rainfall is critical for water resource management. In the recent past, remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies have been widely used in the estimation of surface runoff from watersheds, and from agricultural fields in particular. This is due to the inherent ability of remote sensing to capture spatial heterogeneity of surface parameters such as land use and land cover. This could lead to better performances of surface runoff simulation models.