On September 18, 2023, the One CGIAR initiative on Livestock and Climate, in collaboration with the Direction General des Forets (DGF) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), hosted a webinar addressing the challenges and opportunities in leveraging native species for the restoration of degraded silvopastoral systems in Tunisia. The webinar convened 34 participants from diverse national research and development institutions, fostering a rich exchange of perspectives.

Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (PICSA) is an agricultural extension and climate services approach that supports farmers in making plans and decisions tailored to each farmer’s own ‘context’ in their production systems. It is implemented by facilitators (e.g., extension officers, non-governmental organisation field staff, community volunteers and researchers) through a series of meetings with groups of farmers.

Work package 4 maps rice areas using remote sensing, geographic information system (GIS), and crop modeling. This work builds on the Remote sensing-based Information and Insurance for Crops in Emerging economies (RIICE, http://www.riice.org/) co-developed by IRRI and implemented in South and Southeast Asian countries. RIICE technology is being introduced across Africa to enhance its rice monitoring system. A set of field protocols and forms was developed for seasonal field data collection.

Assessing the suitability of different crops in specific geographic locations is crucial for optimizing crop productivity, promoting climate resilience, and guiding land use decisions. This study assessed the biophysical suitability of rice, watermelon and maize in the Ganges Delta, one of the most densely populated deltas in the world and also extremely vulnerable to climate change. This delta is expected to increasingly experience more frequent and intense extreme weather events, sea level rise and food insecurity.

Across Africa, banana bunchy top disease (BBTD) severely impacts banana production and livelihoods of millions of small-holder farmers. Mapping vulnerability of landscapes to monitor BBTD establishment and spread is crucial for proactive measures of disease exclusion. To highlight current and future risks of BBTD in Africa, using logistic regression, the relationship between 1160 field-observations from 14 BBTD surveys and environmental covariate maps was determined.

The entire Indian subcontinent experienced devastating floods in the year 2022. The central section of the Godavari river basin (GRB) received torrential rainfall from the southwest monsoon during the second week of July 2022. This study exhibits how Earth observation (EO) datasets and cloud platforms like Google Earth Engine (GEE) can be used for swift, lucid and accurate decoding of the flood inundation signatures. Geospatial analysts can estimate concurrent floods using high-resolution C-band SAR/Sentinel-1 images, gridded precipitation and streamflow forecast datasets.

The spatial heterogeneity of soil properties has a significant impact on crop growth, making it difficult to adopt site-specific crop management practices. Traditional laboratory-based analyses are costly, and data extrapolation for mapping soil properties using high-resolution imagery becomes a computationally expensive procedure, taking days or weeks to obtain accurate results using a desktop workstation. To overcome these challenges, cloud-based solutions such as Google Earth Engine (GEE) have been used to analyze complex data with machine learning algorithms.

Climate change has become a significant threat to Western African countries in recent decades, including Senegal. Further, there has been an increasing occurrence of extreme events such as droughts. Droughts, directly and indirectly, have detrimental impacts on human health and often trigger nutritional status in the respective region. Children under the age of five are more vulnerable to Droughts in terms of malnutrition. In Senegal also, drought has unforeseen impacts on health systems and impacts the nutritional dynamics of children.

Present global maps of soil water retention (SWR) are mostly derived from pedotransfer functions (PTFs) applied to maps of other basic soil properties. As an alternative, ‘point-based’ mapping of soil water content can improve global soil data availability and quality. We developed point-based global maps with estimated uncertainty of the volumetric SWR at 100, 330 and 15 000 cm suction using measured SWR data extracted from the WoSIS Soil Profile Database together with data estimated by a random forest PTF (PTF-RF).

The first round of the Myanmar Agricultural Performance Survey (MAPS)–a nationwide phone panel consisting of 3,893 households–was implemented between February 2022 and March 2022. The objective of the survey was to collect data on farm characteristics and agricultural assets, area and crops planted, access to inputs, crop marketing, and constraints in agricultural activities.

Status and trends of mixed farming systems, targeting, data visualization.

Status and trends of mixed farming systems, targeting, data visualization.