In time for the holidays: Interactive map shows where your food comes from (University of Colorado Boulder)

University of Colorado Boulder: In time for the holidays: Interactive map shows where your food comes from. “With Food Twin, users can look up their home county to see how much of 25 critical food crops their local regions both produce and consume. Those food staples include everything from wheat to tomatoes and peanuts, grown both in the U.S. and overseas. The map similarly tracks the flow of food across the country, following highways from sites like Kern County, California, to Denver, Chicago and beyond.”

KRQE: New Mexico farmers can now find land on new website

KRQE: New Mexico farmers can now find land on new website. “What is a farmer without access to land? A new website launched by the New Mexico State University’s Cooperative Extension Service aims to make sure those looking for land can connect with local landowners. The site is called New Mexico LandLink. Sort of like a social media site, New Mexico LandLink lets people find each other and connect with the goal of putting good land to use.”

NIDIS: Expanded Drought.gov Tool Visualizes Historical Drought Conditions by County, State

NIDIS: Expanded Drought.gov Tool Visualizes Historical Drought Conditions by County, State. “The U.S. Drought Portal’s Historical Data and Conditions Tool allows users to visualize historical drought data for their state or county through an interactive map and time series graph. Recently, NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) partnered with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) to expand and improve this interactive tool—making it easier to visualize and share historical data for use in communications, research, or decision-making.”

Idaho Business Review: Which wines pair best with travel? New website helps answer the question

Idaho Business Review: Which wines pair best with travel? New website helps answer the question. “Planning to take a wine-centric trip? Or would you like to embark on a few wine tastings while getting away? Either way, the Idaho Wine Commission’s newly unveiled website should be able to help wine lovers get the most cabernet for their cash. The commission’s new website includes an interactive map showcasing each of Idaho’s six wine regions.”

Princeton University: The world has a food-waste problem. Can this wireless tech help fix it?

Princeton University: The world has a food-waste problem. Can this wireless tech help fix it?. “One bad apple may not spoil the whole bunch, but when it comes to distributing food, a lot of good goes out with the bad. Now, researchers from Princeton University and Microsoft Research have developed a fast and accurate way to determine fruit quality, piece by piece, using high-frequency wireless technology. The new tool gives suppliers a way to sort fruit based on fine-grained ripeness measurements.”

NASA: OpenET Launches a New API

NASA: OpenET Launches a New API. “On Tuesday, October 3, NASA Ames’ OpenET program launched an application programming interface (API) for its widely-used Data Explorer tool. OpenET is a program providing satellite-based information on evapotranspiration (ET) and agricultural water use, currently deployed across the 23 westernmost continental states. Data is provided at a scale of individual fields, or a quarter acre per pixel, and available at daily, monthly, and annual time scales.”

SCOOP NZ: New Database Paves Way For Trees To Thrive In Face Of Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss

SCOOP New Zealand: New Database Paves Way For Trees To Thrive In Face Of Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss . “The database, Tree Globally Observed Environmental Ranges or TreeGOER, for short, documents the observed environmental ranges for the majority of known tree species. It was developed at the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), an international research and development organization on trees, forests, agroforestry and landscapes. The open-access database is available on Zenodo and described in the journal Global Change Biology. TreeGOER documents the global environmental ranges for 51 variables for observed occurrences of 48,129 tree species.”

Michigan State University: MSU Libraries’ Turfgrass Information Center TGIF database now open access

Michigan State University: MSU Libraries’ Turfgrass Information Center TGIF database now open access. “The TGIF database indexes material from a wide variety of sources including governments, higher learning institutions, professional organizations and private publishers. Materials include articles from peer-reviewed publications, technical reports and conference proceedings, trade and professional publications, local professional newsletters, popular magazines, monographs, theses and dissertations, fact sheets and brochures, images, software, and web documents.”

Carnegie Mellon University: Student SURF Project Amplifies Unheard Voices in Kingdom of a Million Rice Fields

Carnegie Mellon University: Student SURF Project Amplifies Unheard Voices in Kingdom of a Million Rice Fields. “[Andy] Jiang received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) to create an interactive, online archive of the stories shared by villagers in this area of Thailand, also known as the Kingdom of a Million Rice Fields. Drawing inspiration from engaging site designs like Refugee Republic, he hopes the archive will amplify the people’s voices and increase the public’s awareness around the new developments, the city’s growth and the loss of agricultural land.”

FSIS Launches New Data Tool: Recall and Public Health Alert API (USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service)

US Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service: FSIS Launches New Data Tool: Recall and Public Health Alert API. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) launched a new feature on its website that enables software developers to access data on recalls and public health alerts through an application programming interface (API).”

Penn State: New updates come to ‘Beescape,’ an online tool for supporting pollinators

Penn State: New updates come to ‘Beescape,’ an online tool for supporting pollinators. “Beescape is a mapping tool that allows users to highlight a particular location or area and get information about the habitat quality for bees. The updates include several changes to make the website more interactive and user-friendly, based on feedback given by stakeholders including growers, beekeepers, scientists and conservationists.”

Forests News: New citizen science platform allows everyone to shape agroecological transitions

Forests News: New citizen science platform allows everyone to shape agroecological transitions . “Developed together with the Agroecology Map team, the One Million Voices of Agroecology platform easily allows users – be those farmers, producer organizations, consumers or anyone else interested in agroecology – to characterize and evaluate their diverse agroecological practices and locate them on a worldwide map.”

US Department of Agriculture: USDA introduces geospatial data product to show crop rotation patterns

US Department of Agriculture: USDA introduces geospatial data product to show crop rotation patterns. “[Crop Sequence Boundaries] is a cutting-edge map of agricultural fields that provides crop acreage estimates and historical planting decisions across the contiguous United States. The open-source product uses satellite imagery and other public data to allow users to analyze planted U.S. commodities, enhancing not only agricultural science and research, but providing producers an innovative resource to help make farming decisions.”