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Good Questions
SPAM Outputs: What are the Units?
Harvested area and physical area both reported in hectares. Production is reported in tons. (Note groundnut production is measured in the shell) Yield units in SPAM are kilograms / hectare. More specifically, yields are reported for wet crops, as in the amount harvested on the field per hectare.
What does it take to prepare SPAM data?
Why does new SPAM take so long to release? The biggest delays occur around the acquisition and “cleaning” of subnational production statistics.
How can I help?
Your comments and feedback are highly appreciated. We also value any basic statistics data (crop area, production, yield), that you can share. Accurate statistical data at the subnational level is an important driver in generating and improving SPAM. Please browse the many ways of visualizing SPAM data and feel free to comment on its veracity. [...]
Why is / isn’t this crop here?
Why is there no maize in my backyard? While SPAM results show accurate crop patterns, the uncertainty at farm level is high. Such uncertainty is from multiple sources such as uncertainty of cropland estimation from satellite imagery, wrong census data, and modeling inaccuracy. This is particular true at global scale models, which are difficult to [...]
What is the plan?
What’s the plan for the next version/generation of SPAM? We will continue to improve our model as more and more remote sensing data are available. On one hand, we would improve SPAM 2000 results by incoorperating comments/feedbacks from users, or newly collected data. On the other hand, we are preparing for SPAM 2005 – global [...]
About the name
What’s ISPAM? ISPAM stands for IFPRI Spatial Production Allocaiton Model, an alternative name for SPAM. Any plan to change the name? No. While we understand the (not so good) implication of SPAM, we have not come to a better name. If you have one, please let us know.
History of SPAM
How was SPAM started? During the project of “policies on food, agriculture and the evironment, indicators and priorities for Agricultureal research in Latin American and Carribeans (LAC)”, we need to account for spatial heterogeneity of evaluating technical change in agriculture. This necessity forced us to look at crop production and productivity at smalerl scale than [...]
Input systems for rice
I’m doing a quick study on rice methane emissions and would like to see if the SPAM rice categories (irrigated, rainfed/high-input, rainfed/low-input) could be translated to irrigated, flooded and upland rice. How do the SPAM categories work for rice? Currently, there is no special explicit consideration for rice to distinguish the flooded and upland rice. [...]
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