Fall armyworm from a maize multi-peril pest risk perspective.

We assembled 3,175 geo-tagged occurrences of fall armyworm worldwide and used that data in conjunction with information about the physiological requirements of the pest to spatially assess its global climate suitability. Our analysis indicates that almost the entire African maize crop is grown in areas with climates that support seasonal infestations of the insect, while almost 92% of the maize area supports year-round growth of the pest. In contrast, rich-country maize production largely occurs in temperate areas where only 2.

Scientific selection: A century of increasing crop varietal diversity in US wheat.

A prevalent and persistent biodiversity concern is that modern cropping systems lead to an erosion in crop genetic diversity. Although certain trait uniformity provides advantages in crop management and marketing, farmers facing risks from change in climate, pests, and markets are also incentivized to adopt new varieties to address complex and spatially variable genetics, environment, and crop management interactions to optimize crop performance. In this study, we applied phylogenetically blind and phylogenetically informed diversity metrics to reveal significant increases in both the spatial and temporal diversity of the US wheat crop over the past century.

The Influence of Weather on the Occurrence of Aflatoxin B1 in Harvested Maize from Kenya and Tanzania.

A study was conducted using maize samples collected from different agroecological zones of Kenya ( = 471) and Tanzania ( = 100) during the 2013 maize harvest season to estimate a relationship between aflatoxin B1 concentration and occurrence with weather conditions during the growing season. The toxins were analysed by the ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) method. Aflatoxin B1 incidence ranged between 0-100% of samples in different regions with an average value of 29.

A Probabilistic Bio-Economic Assessment of the Global Consequences of Wheat Leaf Rust.

This study provides a bio-economic assessment of the global climate suitability and probabilistic crop-loss estimates attributable to wheat leaf rust. We draw on a purpose-built, spatially explicit, ecoclimatic suitability model for wheat leaf rust to estimate that 94.4% of global wheat production is vulnerable to the disease.

Inventions and patenting in Africa: Empirical trends from 1970 to 2010.

Economic development is increasingly dependent upon on utilizing new knowledge to innovate and create value, even in traditional industries and in low-income countries. This analysis uses evidence on patent families to assess innovation activity throughout sub-Saharan Africa. We find patent activity in sub-Saharan Africa-both by African inventors and by foreign inventors-is comparable to similar regions around the world, when conditioned on economic size.

Reshuffling the global R&D deck, 1980-2050.

Based on more recent science spending developments in countries such as China, Korea, India and Brazil, there is a growing sense that the world's scientific deck of cards is in the midst of a major reshuffle. But it is not clear if this reordering is limited to just the top spenders, or, indeed, how these changes have been playing out over the longer term. The new, more comprehensive research and development (R&D) spending estimates presented and discussed here reveal that we are in the midst of a possibly game-changing, albeit partial and perhaps irregular, reshuffle of the global R&D deck.

Pixelating crop production: Consequences of methodological choices.

Worldwide, crop production is intrinsically intertwined with biological, environmental and economic systems, all of which involve complex, inter-related and spatially-sensitive phenomena. Thus knowing the location of agriculture matters much for a host of reasons. There are several widely cited attempts to model the spatial pattern of crop production worldwide, not least by pixilating crop production statistics originally reported on an areal (administrative boundary) basis.

Returns to food and agricultural R&D investments in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1975-2014.

Research-enabled growth in agricultural productivity is pivotal to sub-Saharan Africa's overall economic growth prospects. Yet, investments in research and development (R&D) targeted to many national food and agricultural economies throughout Africa are fragile and faltering. To gain insight into what could be driving this trend, this article updates, summarizes and reassesses the published evidence on the returns to African agricultural R&D.