Texas Almanac Characterization Tool.

Updated 02/27/2009

A resource base for characterizing the agricultural, natural, and human environments of Texas.

Corbett, J.D., S.N. Collis, E.I. Muchugu, B.R. Bush, R.A. Burton, R.F. O’Brien, R.E. Martinez, R. Gutierrez, and R.Q. Jeske, 1998.

Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Texas A&M University System, Blackland Research Center Report No. 98-07, November 1998, documentation and CD-ROM.

The Characterization, Assessment, and Applications Group (CAAG) of the Blackland Research Center is developing a stand-alone spatial information system for Texas. The Texas Almanac Characterization Tool (ACT) is designed to provide query and exploration tools to access a suite of data that describe the biophysical, social, and economic character of user selected target areas. Our tools are designed to provide spatial information for agricultural and natural resource management initiatives. The information system is designed to be vertically integrated in terms of scale (inclusive from point data e.g., yield trial information or daily meteorological data through to long-term, macro scale climatic information) and cross disciplinary (biophysical and social/economic information).

At present, there are four separate though integrated pieces to the ACT. The general environmental character or spatial tool (site and zone similarity and other biophysical character diagnostic tools), a ‘weather reporter’ which in this version is fairly simple, but it allows for the access to and graphical display of daily meteorological data. The future of this tool is fairly well designed, with probabilities and other mechanisms to examine the in-season distribution of rainfall, for example. The 3rd part is a "crops" database which for Texas is not fully populated with data. Our Country Almanacs for east Africa include the EVT (elite variety trials) from CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Mexico) for their Africa stations. Every trial is in the database and it can be evaluated from nursery attributes (yield, days to silking, disease pressure etc.), country etc. and by the climatic characteristics based on the location of the trial station. The analogous information sets for Texas will span both crops and animal production testing and include ecological (e.g., plant specie or wildlife distribution) and pathology data (distribution of specific tick species or crop diseases like cotton root rot). The final part concentrates on documentation -- digital documentation that is fully searchable by any text string. The present ion of the Texas digital "library" emphasizes publications from the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station. These publications are available on the web, but taken together, indexed, and packaged into an integrated whole, they become a rapidly accessible literature foundation.

Our design plans include enhancements to the present functions (in particular the weather reporter can be enhanced with probability functions and water balance simulation models) and additional diagnostic and analytical capabilities. For example, we plan to provide access to the APEX crop simulation model. This step would enable the testing of a management or variety over space, calibrating the results to observation points. We will also improve the databases over time, with a growing emphasis on time series data (meteorological, production, population demographics etc.).

The Texas ACT is designed to promote the use of spatial analytical procedures in agricultural and natural resource management research, development, and extension. A key concept integral to the ACT is the use of these tools as a mechanism for institutional memory. We have begun an active use of these tools in East Africa for a livestock early warning system. By monitoring livestock health over time — and storing all data by where (use of GPS and georeferencing) and when (the date) — we are building an ecologically sensitive mechanism to establish range capacity in concert with meteorological events. We envision an information tool of use to decision makers at the policy level as well as extension officers working in much more local areas. The ACT serves as a dynamic repository of these spatially explicit information. The foundation database (biophysical, production, social, economic, infrastructure etc.) encourages the link between simulation models run over space with summarized recommendations appropriate for management decisions.

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