The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Agro-Ecological Zoning Atlas. Part 1: Agro-climatic indicators

Agriculture is crucial for the national economy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Adoption of new strategies for agriculture monitoring, rural land use planning, and management are urgently required to reduce hunger and poverty and to assure sustainable food and feed production for future generations. The availability of reliable information on natural resources and agriculture for its monitoring and analysis is indispensable to the development and implementation of such strategies. For this purpose the project “Strengthening Afghanistan Institutions’ Capacity for the Assessment of Agriculture Production and Scenario Development” (GCP/AFG/087/EC), funded by the European Union (EU), is implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Within the context of this project, FAO and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) are developing a National Agro-Ecological Zoning activity (NAEZ) in Afghanistan. This Atlas is the first of two books and provides the collected information and maps of the country based on the agro-climatic Indicators

Afghanistan's Agro-ecological zoning atlas. Part 2: Agro-ecological assessments. First revision

Agriculture is crucial for the national economy of Afghanistan and in particularly so for the agriculturally dependent population which is constituting 60 percent of the total population. Adoption of new strategies for agriculture monitoring, rural land use planning and land management are urgently required to reduce hunger and poverty among rural population and to assure sustainable food and feed production for future generations. The availability of reliable information on natural resources and agriculture for its monitoring and analysis is indispensable to development and implementation of such strategies. However, productivity in the agricultural sector has been relatively low. Afghanistan has the potential to increase its output of cereals, fruits and vegetables. For this purpose, the project “Strengthening Afghanistan Institutions’ Capacity for the Assessment of Agriculture Production and Scenario Development” (GCP/AFG/087/EC), funded by the European Union, is implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Among the project objectives are improving the understanding of the country’s national resources endowment and limitations as well as assessing agricultural production capacities under current climatic conditions and likely impacts of climate change. Within the context of this project the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) support and implement a National Agro-Ecological Zoning activity in Afghanistan (NAEZ) which assesses quality and availability of land resources and identifies crop cultivation potentials - suitable area, production and attainable yield - under prevailing soil and terrain conditions and for given current or future agroclimatic conditions. One of the outputs of the NAEZ activities is this Agro-Ecological Zones Atlas which is based on applications of the FAO/IIASA National Agro-Ecological Zoning system for current and future climates

Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0

The Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0 (HWSD v2.0) is a unique global soil inventory providing information on the morphological, chemical and physical properties of soils at approximately 1 km resolution. Its main objective is to be useful for modelers and to serve as a basis for prospective studies on agroecological zoning, food security and the impacts of climate change. HWSD v2.0 also serves an educational function, illustrating the geographical distribution of soils as well as their properties globally. HWSD v2.0 is easily accessible and user-friendly

Harmonized World Soil Database - HWSD (version 1.2)

HWSD-coverDuring discussions at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in 1996, the need was identified for refinement of the agro-edaphic element of IIASA and FAO's Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZ) methodology then being used for IIASA’s "Modeling Land Use and Land Cover Change in Europe and Northern Eurasia (LUC)" project. An IIASA Interim Report was produced in 1997 detailing twenty soil attributes identified as being important for land evaluation, the analyses performed on existing databases, and methodologies for the development of taxotransfer rules to derive necessary data. Conclusions of this report were used for the analyses of that time, but the process that was born continued to develop into what would eventually become a separate product, the Harmonized World Soil Database. Between 2003 and 2006, IIASA and FAO sought out additional partners, including: - ISRIC-World Soil Information, together with FAO, were responsible for the development of regional soil and terrain databases and the WISE soil profile database; - the European Soil Bureau Network, which had recently completed a major update of soil information for Europe and northern Eurasia, and - the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which provided the recent 1:1,000,000 scale Soil Map of China. Vast volumes of recently collected regional and national updates of soil information collected by the partners were assimilated and harmonized by IIASA, where the HWSD raster, database, and viewer software were designed, implemented, and packaged for CD and web distribution into this state-of-the-art database. Version 1.0 was released in 2008. Since then, it has been updated with new information several times, has been used extensively around the world, and has recently been adopted by the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) as the definitive soil database at present, with plans for further updates made as part of the GSP process. The HWSD is of immediate use in the context of the Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol for soil carbon measurements and for the FAO/IIASA Global Agro-ecological Assessment studies (GAEZ 2012), for which HWSD was developed in the first place. The HWSD contributes sound scientific knowledge for planning sustainable expansion of agricultural production to achieve food security and provides information for national and international policymakers in addressing emerging problems of land competition for food production, bio-energy demand and threats to biodiversity. The HWSD is a 30 arc-second raster database with over 16000 different soil mapping units that combines existing regional and national updates of soil information worldwide (SOTER, ESD, Soil Map of China, WISE) with the information contained within the 1:5 000 000 scale FAO-UNESCO Soil Map of the World (FAO, 19711981). The resulting raster database consists of 21600 rows and 43200 columns, which are linked to harmonized soil property data. The use of a standardized structure allows for the linkage of the attribute data with the raster map to display or query the composition in terms of soil units and the characterization of selected soil parameters (organic Carbon, pH, water storage capacity, soil depth, cation exchange capacity of the soil and the clay fraction, total exchangeable nutrients, lime and gypsum contents, sodium exchange percentage, salinity, textural class and granulometry). Reliability of the information contained in the database is variable: the parts of the database that still make use of the Soil Map of the World such as North America, Australia, West Africa and South Asia are considered less reliable, while most of the areas covered by SOTER databases are considered to have the highest reliability (Central and Southern Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and Eastern Europe)

Modeled spatial assessment of biomass productivity and technical potential of Miscanthus× giganteus, Panicum virgatum L. and Jatropha on marginal land in China

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was supported by Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC). We thank our colleagues from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences for data collection, and thank Tao Sang from the Institute of Botany of Chinese Academy of Sciences for providing data. The MiscanFor modeling was supported by UK NERC ADVENT (NE/1806209) and FAB-GGR (NE/P019951/1) project funding. John Clifton-Brown received support from the United Kingdom's DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) as part of the MISCOMAR project (FACCE SURPLUS, Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture for food and non-food systems)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Potential impacts on ecosystem services of land use transitions to second-generation bioenergy crops in GB

We present the first assessment of the impact of land use change (LUC) to second-generation (2G) bioenergy crops on ecosystem services (ES) resolved spatially for Great Britain (GB). A systematic approach was used to assess available evidence on the impacts of LUC from arable, semi-improved grassland or woodland/forest, to 2G bioenergy crops, for which a quantitative ‘threat matrix’ was developed. The threat matrix was used to estimate potential impacts of transitions to either Miscanthus, short-rotation coppice (SRC, willow and poplar) or short-rotation forestry (SRF). The ES effects were found to be largely dependent on previous land uses rather than the choice of 2G crop when assessing the technical potential of available biomass with a transition from arable crops resulting in the most positive effect on ES. Combining these data with constraint masks and available land for SRC and Miscanthus (SRF omitted from this stage due to lack of data), south-west and north-west England were identified as areas where Miscanthus and SRC could be grown, respectively, with favourable combinations of economic viability, carbon sequestration, high yield and positive ES benefits. This study also suggests that not all prospective planting of Miscanthus and SRC can be allocated to agricultural land class (ALC) ALC 3 and ALC 4 and suitable areas of ALC 5 are only minimally available. Beneficial impacts were found on 146 583 and 71 890 ha when planting Miscanthus or SRC, respectively, under baseline planting conditions rising to 293 247 and 91 318 ha, respectively, under 2020 planting scenarios. The results provide an insight into the interplay between land availability, original land uses, bioenergy crop type and yield in determining overall positive or negative impacts of bioenergy cropping on ecosystems services and go some way towards developing a framework for quantifying wider ES impacts of this important LUC

New generation of hydraulic pedotransfer functions for Europe

A range of continental-scale soil datasets exists in Europe with different spatial representation and based on different principles. We developed comprehensive pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for applications principally on spatial datasets with continental coverage. The PTF development included the prediction of soil water retention at various matric potentials and prediction of parameters to characterize soil moisture retention and the hydraulic conductivity curve (MRC and HCC) of European soils. We developed PTFs with a hierarchical approach, determined by the input requirements. The PTFs were derived by using three statistical methods: (i) linear regression where there were quantitative input variables, (ii) a regression tree for qualitative, quantitative and mixed types of information and (iii) mean statistics of developer-defined soil groups (class PTF) when only qualitative input parameters were available. Data of the recently established European Hydropedological Data Inventory (EU-HYDI), which holds the most comprehensive geographical and thematic coverage of hydro-pedological data in Europe, were used to train and test the PTFs. The applied modelling techniques and the EU-HYDI allowed the development of hydraulic PTFs that are more reliable and applicable for a greater variety of input parameters than those previously available for Europe. Therefore the new set of PTFs offers tailored advanced tools for a wide range of applications in the continent

High-resolution spatial modelling of greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change to energy crops in the United Kingdom

Funded by Energy Technologies Institute EPSRC-Supergen. Grant Number: EP/M013200/1Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Pollination and biological control research: are we neglecting two billion smallholders

Food insecurity is a major world problem, with ca. 870 million people in the world being chronically undernourished. Most of these people live in tropical, developing regions and rely on smallholder farming for food security. Solving the problem of food insecurity is thought to depend, in part, on managing ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops and the biological control of crop pests, to enhance or maintain food production. Our knowledge regarding regulating ecosystem services in smallholder-farmed (or dualistic) landscapes is limited and whilst pollination has been the focus of considerable research, the provision of natural enemy services, important for every crop worldwide, has been relatively neglected. In order to assess whether ecosystem-service research adequately represents smallholder-farmed landscapes, whilst also considering climatic region and national economic status, we examined the constituent studies of recent quantitative reviews relevant to biological control and pollination. No regulating ecosystem service meta-analysis, to our knowledge, has focussed on smallholder agriculture despite its importance to billions of peoples’ local food security. We found that whilst smallholdings contributed 16% of global farmland area and 83% of the global agricultural population (estimated using FAO’s World Census of Agriculture 2000) only 22 of 190 studies (12%), overall, came from smallholder-farmed landscapes. These smallholder studies mostly concerned coffee production (16 studies). Individual reviews of biological control were significantly and strongly biased towards data from large-scale farming in temperate regions. In contrast pollination reviews included more smallholder studies and were more balanced for climate regions. The high diversity of smallholder-farmed landscapes implies that more research will be needed to understand them compared to large-scale landscapes but we found far more research from the latter. We highlight that these skews in research effort have implications for sustainable intensification and the food security of billions in the developing world. In particular we urge for balance in future ecosystem-services research and synthesis by greater consideration of a diverse range of smallholder-farmed landscapes in Africa and continental Asia

ELUM: User-friendly spatial modelling tool predicts net soil greenhouse gas balance of bioenergy land-use change in UK up to 2050

The ELUM Software Package spatially predicts the net soil greenhouse gas balance of land-use change to grow energy crops in the UK up to 2050. It is able to support a range of analyses of bioenergy, and was developed in consultation with anticipated users. Results can be obtained according to specific interests, viewed in the graphical interface and exported for a variety of purposes. The functionality of the software is demonstrated through different case studies, which show an array of applications