Governments in many countries are decentralising to give more control over decision making and budgets to local administrations. One expectation of this change is that local governments will more effectively and efficiently respond to the poorest citizens in their jurisdictions. Decentralisation is especially significant to forest communities, which have historically benefited little from government services and poverty reduction programmes because of their physical isolation and social marginalisation.

This training manual is intended for scientists and students who work with biodiversity data and are interested in developing skills to effectively carry out spatial analysis based on (free) GIS applications with a focus on diversity and ecological analyses.

These analyses offer a better understanding of spatial patterns of plant diversity and distribution, helping to improve conservation efforts. The training manual focuses on plants of interest for improving livelihoods (e.g. crops, trees and crop wild relatives) and/or those which are endangered.

Strategic research in agriculture and natural resources carried out by international research centers is deemed a public good and should, sooner or later, be put into the hands of development, governmental and non-governmental organizations. However, this research is usually done at specific pilot sites; there is a greater need to know how representative those sites are in relation to the diversity of contexts in other locations.

Geographical information systems (GIS) assist us in mapping and analyzing outbreaks of diseases in plants, animals and humans. This paper describes how GIS are being used to model the intensity of the outbreak of a plant virus, bean golden mosaic virus (BGMV) in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. BGMV is a geminivirus affecting beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) and is transmitted by a vector, the sweet potato whitefly (Bemisia tabaci). Once a plant is infected by the virus yield losses, at varying locations, can range from 40% to 100%.

More than 1 million hectares of urban land in India could be irrigated for crops if wastewater was made safe for use. Lack of systematic data collection by municipalities makes it difficult to accurately assess the wastewater generation or estimate the total amount of urban area under wastewater irrigation, so the potential of urban and peri-urban farming could be even greater.

We developed interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas (excluding Antarctica) at a spatial resolution of 30 arc s (often referred to as 1-km spatial resolution). The climate elements considered were monthly precipitation and mean, minimum, and maximum temperature. Input data were gathered from a variety of sources and, where possible, were restricted to records from the 1950 2000 period. We used the thin-plate smoothing spline algorithm implemented in the ANUSPLIN package for interpolation, using latitude, longitude, and elevation as independent variables.