GCP collaborator wins 4th prize for drought timing tool

Tuesday, 06 April 2010 19:00

Geographic Information System (GIS) senior analyst Ernesto Giron of Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical (CIAT), a key contributor to the work carried out by CIAT for GCP Subprogramme (SP) 3 project G4008.34: Environmental assessment for phenotyping network, has been awarded fourth prize in a competition for geodevelopers.

The competition, known as the ‘ESRI 2010 Mashup Challenge’, and launched by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), demanded that competitors build a ‘mashup’ using ESRI's online content and shoot a video describing the application. The mashup had to be deployed as a web application and needed to combine data from more than one source, including ArcGIS Online content, into a single web application.

Ernesto was the proud recipient of fourth prize and an award of $2,500 for his development of a web-based GIS research tool for Drought Timing for Agronomic Screening, an international, interactive soil map that indicates soil type and quality and climate patterns in a specified area and its agricultural capabilities with respect to potential drought conditions. The map and application was commissioned and funded by the above-named SP3 project, but has also spawned similar tools for GCP Subprogramme 5 projects G4006.13: Targeting and impact analysis of Generation Challenge Programme.

More details on the ESRI competition and outcomes are available here.

Please join us in congratulating Ernesto and his team members for this great achievement!

Besides the recent success in the ESRI competition, news of the map has also reached the eyes and ears of many, with the tool having featured in a speech at the WHERE 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, USA – a cutting-edge event in the field of geographic information systems and science. Read more (in Spanish).

For Executive Summaries of the above-named GCP research projects, please see our Programme publications page.