An International Conference was held in Rome, Italy 27-29 April 2015 to launch the IFAD and EU supported Project ‘Linking agrobiodiversity value chains, climate adaptation and nutrition: Empowering the poor to manage risk’. The event brought together people with different expertise to discuss the role of agricultural biodiversity in fostering more resilient livelihoods and solicit their guidance to refine the methodological framework for the Project.

G-Range is a global model that simulates generalized changes in rangelands through time,

created with support from the International Livestock Research Institute. Spatial data and a set

of parameters that control plant growth and other ecological attributes in landscape units

combine with computer code to represent ecological process such as soil nutrient and water

dynamics, vegetation growth, fire, and wild and domestic animal offtake. The model is spatial,

with areas of the world divided into square cells.

A CTA study visit to agroforestry projects in Malawi and Zambia...

The contemporary concern about anthropogenic release of greenhouse gas (GHG) into the

environment and the contribution of livestock to this phenomenon have sparked animal

scientists’ interest in predicting methane (CH4) emissions by ruminants. Focusing on milk

production, we address six basic nutrition models or feeding standards (mostly empirical

systems) and five complex nutrition models (mostly mechanistic systems), describe their key

characteristics, and highlight their similarities and differences. Four models were selected to

Summarises the work that ILCA is doing to assemble what information is available on livestock breeds and breeding in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Niger River Basin covers 7.5% of the African continent, and is shared between nine riparian

countries. The basin countries can be categorized into water resources producers, consumers, both

producers and consumers, and minimum contributors and consumers. As in the case for most

transboundary rivers, upstream and downstream conflicts emanating from the development and

utilization of the Niger River are inevitable and are expected to be intense, particularly given the

Rangeland scientists and quantitative ecologists have developed numerous methods and monitoring techniques that can be used for vegetation sampling (Barbour et al. 1987). The methods used to position samples (transects, quadrats, lines, and points) vary and can be classed as selective, capricious, systematic, or random. One of the prerequisites for valid statistical inference is that samples are taken randomly. A random sampling procedure implies that all elements or units of the population being studied have an equal chance of being represented in the sample.