• A compendium of digital data on climate, soils, elevation, land use, population, and maize-related information for sub-Saharan Africa.

• Allows researchers to characterize regions of interest, assess climate risks to agriculture, target promising germplasm/agronomic practices (even predicting their potential impacts), and many other useful functions.
• Provided in a stand-alone, CD format.
• Easy to useno prior experience in geographic information systems required!
• Includes ArcExplorer (from ESRI), so users can immediately explore and manipulate data. (Features over 140 predesigned ArcExplorer projects and an introductory tutorial.)

The Atlas brings the power of a geographic information system (GIS) to maize workers and other researchers in sub-Saharan Africa, at virtually no cost. Its totally stand-alone format includes ArcExplorer, but all data are stored as ESRI shapefiles, allowing use with more sophisticated GIS software (ArcView, ArcInfo, etc.).

The Atlas contains over 150 different layers of spatial data, covering roughly all of Africa from southern Chad, Mali, Niger and Sudan to the Cape of Good Hope. Version 2.0 also has an added focus on the Southern African Development Community (SADC, including Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). Geographic information is combined with maize-related data, such as climate similarity zones for 104 major maize research sites, estimation of climatic risk at specific crop growth stages, simulated maize yields for East Africa (derived from the CERES model), and human consumption/nutrition data.

Authors
D.P. Hodson, A. Rodríguez,
J.W. White, J.D. Corbett,
R.F. O'Brien, and M. Bänziger

The CIMMYT Natural Resources Group (NRG) and Texas A&M University

Contact: d.hodson@cgiar.org

August, 2004

 CIMMYT Worldwide - Africa