In last year’s annual report, we featured a story about the new Landscapes Portal (http:// landscapeportal.org), which is designed for scientists to store data, create maps and merge their own data with data from other scientists. The portal is also a forum for sharing blog posts and can be used in many different ways as an analytic tool.
“We are asking scientists here to upload all their datasets onto the Landscape Portal,” says Tor- Gunnar Vågen, head of the World Agroforestry Centre’s GeoScience Lab. “Normally, there is a one- to two-year moratorium during which the data remain private, but once that is over, we want the datasets to be in the public domain.” Tor and his colleagues in the GeoScience Lab hold regular seminars to encourage scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre to use the Landscape Portal.
Since its launch, the number of people using the portal has rapidly increased. In mid-2014, there were approximately 150 registered users. By February 2015, there were over 1000. During this period, the Landscape Portal received over 1 million requests for information. The vast majority came from outside the World Agroforestry Centre, with most of the traffic from the United States, India and China.
The Landscape Portal can be used in many different ways. To give just one example, in 2014 Tor was commissioned by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) to provide a rigorous, science-based framework for establishing baselines and monitoring soil and ecosystem health in two community conservancies, Kalama and Namunyak, in northern Kenya. NRT has helped an ever-increasing number of mostly pastoralist communities to establish conservancies as a way of conserving wildlife and improving the livelihoods of local people.
Over much of northern Kenya, the rangelands have been overgrazed and severely degraded. Working with Leigh Winowiecki from the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research (CIAT), Tor used the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF), developed by the Centre and its partners under the Africa Soil Information Service Project, to measure a range of key indicators of soil health, including soil organic carbon, erosion, vegetation cover and water retention capacity.
The findings will enable NRT and the community conservancies to target their interventions – for example, the way in which pastoralists graze their cattle – to address specific rangeland problems, such as erosion and low carbon content. Tor and his colleagues in the GeoScience Lab have developed an interactive tool on the Landscape Portal so that NRT can explore indicators of rangeland health, such as herbaceous cover, soil erosion, soil carbon and woody cover in their conservancies.
