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In September, ESRI organized the Global Land and Poverty Summit 2010 in Washington, DC, focusing on "...how to use geographic technology to help solve diverse problems faced by the poor and to create low-cost, practical solutions for healthy, sustainable societies.”

As announced at the earlier AAGW 2010, CGIAR-CSI led an agriculture-themed session called "Dirt Poor: Seeking Solutions to Poverty from the Ground Up", together with USDA-ERS. We collectively made three presentations that largely encompassed recent research highlights:

• Prioritizing, Targeting and Monitoring Science, Technology and Policy Options For Poor Smallholders Examples from the CGIAR - Chris Legg (GLCI), Lieven Claessens (CIP), Mario Herrero (ILRI), Philip Thornton (ILRI), and Stanley Wood* (IFPRI)
• Payments for Wildlife Conservation (PWC) and Poverty in East African Rangelands - Philip Osano* (ILRI), Jan de Leeuw (ILRI), Mohammed Said (ILRI), Shem Kifugo (ILRI), Dickson Kaelo (Basecamp Foundation), Norbert Henniger (World Resource Institute), Katherine Homewood (University College London)
• Seeing is Believing: Very High Resolution for Smallholders in West Africa - Pierre Sibiry Traore* (ICRISAT)

Overall the session was very well received, and we impressively (as usual) showcased our colleagues' hard work on this area. You can take a look at (or download) the presentations at https://hc.box.net/shared/86szh19luc

Sincere thanks (and big cheers) to everyone for attending/contributing/supporting the event!

Source: Map Analysis by Joseph K. Berry (http://www.innovativegis.com/basis/MapAnalysis/Topic11/Topic11.htm#Surface_area)

Does anybody have/know a publicly-available global raster dataset of land surface area with terrain considered (see the attached illustration describing the surface area)?

All I want is, very simply (?), for each grid cell (at 5’ or higher resolution) what’s the land surface area (in ha, for example). Can’t believe nobody has done/published it yet (hey, we’re in the age of 30 m DEM..), but I couldn’t find one – other than some theoretical backgrounds here and there, and the TIN stuff in ArcGIS (Thanks, Kai!).

For mapping crop land globally, we conveniently ignored the existence of slope/terrain (duh..) and simply calculated the grid cell area = f(latitude) – waterbody (or sometimes even included waterbody), assuming most crops are grown in flat surface,, in the grand scheme of things. Besides, I’ve been hearing that we don’t gain much by including terrain in the function (“Don’t sweat the small stuff!”). However, even if that’s true - as we’re getting more serious about socioeconomic variables beyond crop production, I think we really need to be more accurate calculating the grid cell area (and this potentially propagates through all sorts of indicators we’re estimating cell by cell). And,

So,, anyone?

If I don’t hear from anyone within next couple of weeks, I might just go ahead and scratch my own itch again – but thought worth asking.  : )