SPAM 2005 v3.2 is out!

In collaboration with many CGIAR Centers, since 2007, IFPRI has been leading the development of a global, spatially-disaggregate sub-national crop production statistics database called Spatial Production Allocation Model (SPAM). Today, its latest version, SPAM 2005 v3.2, has been officially released. All 16 GB of data files is available to download from the SPAM website at http://MapSPAM.info (see, it’s a palindrome: SPAM and MAPS) and IFPRI’s Dataverse at http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DHXBJX.

SPAM provides major crop production statistics indicators, such as area, production, and yield, for 42 crops, disaggregated at the input-levels (e.g., irrigated/rainfed and high/low-input) on 10 km grids globally. The SPAM team at IFPRI (Liangzhi You, Ulrike Wood-Sichra, Zhe Guo, and Jawoo Koo) works closely with CGIAR’s crop commodity-focused centers (e.g., CIMMYT for maize and wheat, AfricaRice and IRRI for rice, IITA and CIAT for tropical crops such as banana, plantains, and cassava, CIP for potatoes, and ICRISAT for sorghum, millet, and pulses) to address feedback and improve data quality. Over the years IFPRI released two major updates (SPAM 2000 and SPAM 2005) and a number of minor releases. While the team is working hard to complete the next major update for SPAM 2010 in next few months, this new version of SPAM 2005 v3.2 addresses all the feedback the team received on the earlier releases of SPAM 2005.

All datasets and documentations are openly provided as a global public good through IFPRI’s data repository. Methodology of SPAM has been thoroughly reviewed and published as peer-reviewed journal articles and technical documentations. A number of initiatives and academic journal articles are already using SPAM as their basis of analysis. If you haven’t, try SPAM and join the SPAM Community — feedback always welcome!