The Africa Trial Sites Catalogue

Reaching out to farmers, agronomists and plant breeders

with spatially efficient, participatory testing networks

Glenn Hyman, Pierre Sibiry Traore, Kai Sonder, Juan Arista, Jawoo Koo
 WE KNOW THAT:
•Cultivar testing is a key element in the process of
delivering varieties to farmers
•Multi Environment Trials (MET) and GxE analysis have
a rich history going back 100+ years
•Trial networks for the cereal crops have been
especially effective in the past

BUT
“The poor performance of public institutions in disseminating
improved varieties to small-scale farmers is broadly accepted,
and there is an urgent need to design and test new
institutional arrangements …..”
World Bank Development Report 2007
A solution to improve efficiency of breeding programs
through better availability and exchange of information:

• Create an interactive website that allows breeders, researchers, extensionists

and other people interested in improving crops and getting better access to them
to look for information on trial sites and cultivar evaluations.

• Tools allow to identify those sites in Africa that are most similar to ones place of
interest or work

• Provide location specific data (climate, edaphic, contact) for all trial sites

• Provide access to results from evaluation trials

• Provide contact info and links to online seed ordering services from genebanks
300+ crop
evaluation sites
are currently
represented in
AFRICATS
Basic
agroclimatic
and edaphic
data available
for all stations
Homologue layers for all sites show representativeness of sites
Homologue tool compares any station with all others
And gives
list of 10
most similar
stations to
point of
interest
Links to breeding programs and gene banks
Partners can
enter new
stations and
data as well as
edit existing
ones
Africats incorporates
the Generation
Challenge Program’s
drought timing tool

Supports trial site

planning for cultivars
tolerant to drought

Includes water
balance model
implemented in
Fortran (Peter Jones),
Google maps, and
ArcGIS server.
Africats incorporates
tools developed for
the HarvestChoice
project (Jawoo Koo)

Supports queries of
climate data from the
Worldclim database
Tool for identifying important
crops around a trial site

• Uses the IFPRI SPAM model

• user-defined radius of the
buffer area
• Google maps
• ArcGIS Server
FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS:
1.CIAT secured new funding from the climate change challenge
program (courtesy of Andy Jarvis)
2.New crops: will engage other CGIAR centers not yet involved
3.Expansion to Latin America and Asia (will build identical sites)
4.We’ll hire a dedicated application/Web developer (as opposed
to a student intern)
5.Andy Farrow will lead side meeting in the coming days