Dear colleagues,

Bioversity International has published a “Training Manual on Spatial Analysis of Plant Diversity and Distribution”. The manual has been developed because of an increasing number of requests of national partners for capacity building on the spatial analysis of biodiversity. It is intended for scientists and students who work with biodiversity data and are interested in developing or improving their skills to carry out spatial analysis. It has been designed to serve as a self-teaching manual, but may also be used for training courses and contains nearly 500 Mb of data that accompany specially designed exercises, based on real studies.

The analyses described in the manual help answer common questions related to plant diversity and distribution (e.g. prioritization of areas for conservation, modeling of potential impacts of climate change on plant distribution, gap analysis for priority collection of plant diversity). Exercises are developed for species presence, and morphological or molecular characterization data. They are explained by sets of step-by-step instructions, using the free and publically available software DIVA-GIS and Maxent. Although the focus is on plants of interest for improving livelihoods, many of the analyses described can also be applied to animals and other organisms.

For the moment only an English version is available, a Spanish version is in preparation.

I would be interested to receive your comments.

Maarten

Hi all,

It’s not a secret that we’ve been wanting to have a new/cool/21^st-century-ish logo for CSI for a while. It’s not that the old one is wrong, we just felt that it’s time to update our look. Our desire has been especially more escalated recently while planning for upcoming events and e-Atlas and so on.

So, *surprise* - we just launched a 7-day logo designing contest through a crowdsourcing company called 99designs (http://99designs.com).

·         Contest: New logo wanted for CGIAR CSI

·         Link: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/logo-wanted-cgiar-csi-69892/brief

·         Prize: $295 (minus some fee)

With the level of prize, we’re targeting young creative graphics designers out there. However, that doesn’t stop you or one of your colleagues to become a winner! In fact, given the complexity of design concept (I just hope someone can creatively/cleverly figure how to combine images of agriculture – crop, forest, livestock, fish – and spatial aspects), our colleagues may have comparative advantages. Who knows. Also, if you happened to know a talented logo designer in your ring, feel free to forward this message and encourage them.

After the 7-day period, we’ll ask each center’s representative to be a judge and vote for the best one. Sounds exciting? Wish us a good luck finding an exciting logo soon!

Cheers,

Jawoo

Hello fellow agricultural geographers, geographical agronomists, modelers, crime scene investigators, etc,

as it seems that GRASS is finally running satisfyingly under Windows, something I've wanted to do for a couple of years but didn't want to get into due to the need to have Linux running to fully use the potential of GRASS now seems finally possible. The idea would be to use GRASS 7 and future versions for our training efforts with NARS and other collaborators that can't afford to use ESRI products. In our training courses here with scientists and technicians from all over the world interest in GIS is always very high. We have been using free alternatives like DIVA, GEODA and GVSIG, which work quite well for some things but don't cover all needed functions and it would be better to have everything under one platform. GRASS on the other hand is basically capable of everything that ARCGIS can do with maybe a steeper learning curve and not as user friendly. It would give us the opportunity to properly train people and give them a free powerful tool to incorporate GIS in daily work in institutions. Having said that would it make sense to the CSI community to do this as a joint effort and maybe a product towards our annual meeting? CIMMYT eg would look at modules, functions and data sets relevant to breeders, conservation agric in English and Spanish.
Let me know what you think?

cheers

Kai