Events

We are pleased to announce a workshop this May 23, 2011 to “kick-off” the GEOSHARE (Geospatial, Open-Source Hosting of Agricultural and Environmental Data) pilot project. Details about the project are outlined in “A Global, Spatially-Explicit, Open-Source Data Base for Analysis of Agriculture, Land Use and the Environment,“ a proposal that was drafted by a team of authors led by Tom Hertel with funding from the Foresight Programme of the UK Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, and Skills (link to the full proposal: http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/foresight/).

Sponsored by the Global Policy Research Institute and hosted by the Purdue Climate Change Research Center and the Purdue Center for Global Food Security, this one-day workshop will bring together interested participants to discuss the use of geospatial data for analysis of the global agricultural system. Workshop objectives are to 1) provide a venue for exchange of information among leading researchers about what data are currently available (or attainable in the near term) and which pressing research and policy questions can be addressed with the data flowing out of this type of global spatial data base infrastructure, 2) discuss issues of institutional design and the long-run sustainability of a shared, global, spatial database architecture, and 3) define the broad technical and operational details of the GEOSHARE project.

Confirmed workshop presenters include:

• Wolfgang Britz, Department of Food and Resource Economics, Bonn University


• Noah Diffenbaugh, School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.


• Thomas Hertel, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University


• Glenn Hyman, International Center for Tropical Agriculture, Cali, Colombia


• Robert Jackson: Department of Biology, Duke University


• Christopher Miller, Library Science, Purdue University


• Andrew Nelson, International Rice Research Institute, Manila, Philippines


• Navin Ramankutty, Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Canada


• Stefan Siebert, Institute of Crop Science, Bonn University, Bonn, Germany


• Brent Sohngen, The Ohio State University


• Carol Song, Information Technology at Purdue, Purdue University


• Wally Tyner, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University


• Nelson Villoria, Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University


• Stanley Wood, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C.

The workshop will take place at Discovery Park’s Burton Morgan Center (MRGN 121) beginning at 8:00 a.m. with lunch provided and a reception after the final panel ends at 5:30 p.m. If you are interested in participating, please contact Rose Filley at rfilley@purdue.edu; 765-496-3211. We hope you’ll consider joining us in May.