An App to select suitable food portfolios based on proximity to portfolio sites and agro-ecological zonation
A diversity of nutrient-dense pulse, vegetable and fruit species can contribute largely to family nutrition and food security. To enhance available diversity of foods, while addressing seasonal food availability, nutritious food portfolios have been developed by the World Agroforestry Centre (based on the original Fruit Tree Portfolio concept). These are site-specific combinations of indigenous and exotic food tree species with complementary vegetables, pulses and staple crops that potentially can provide year-round harvest of nutritious foods and, at the same time, fill food harvest and nutrient gaps in local food systems when integrated into food systems.
For more details, please check this open-access article: Developing fruit tree portfolios that link agriculture more effectively with nutrition and health: a new approach for providing year-round micronutrients to smallholder farmers.
Distribution map of portfolios and Agroecological Zones
Click the map below to identify the Agro-Ecological Zone (AEZ).
Click on the markers to identify the name of the portfolio. The hyperlink from a marker takes you to the full details of the portfolio on the World Agroforestry Centre website.
Selected location: coordinates and AEZ
Select a portfolio
The location in the map was in the following AEZ
Food calendar for the selected portfolio
The following portfolio was selected:
Food calendar for the selected portfolio
The following portfolio was selected:
Note that coding in the calendar above is based on the first three characters of the species.
Nutrition tables for specific target groups
The following portfolio was selected:
Species are listed in table in the same order as the calendar.
Sorting can be changed by clicking on column names.
Calculation of the nutrient density score
The following portfolio was selected:
Markers
Location of markers
The markers are located in the centre of villages where the surveys were conducted that informed the development of the portfolios.
Where villages had a significant level of spatial clustering, different markers reflect the distribution of these clusters.
Agro-ecological zones
Agro-ecological zones were created with the BiodiversityR::ensemble.zones function in the R statistical environment.
Input raster layers at resolution of 30 arc-seconds included:
- 19 bioclimatic layers from WorldClim 2.1.
- 16 bioclimatic layers calculated from the WorldClim data with envirem::generateRasters (first the Extra-Terrestrial Solar Radiation was calculated for each year from 1970 to 2000, with the average then used for the calculations).
- topographic wetness and topographic roughness indices obtained from ENVIREM.
- 5 soil layers calculated as averages of bdod, clay, phh2o, sand and silt from depths of 5-15 cm, 15 - 30 cm, 30 - 60 cm and 60 - 100 cm that were downloaded with a customized script developed for SoilGrids250m version 2.0.
- Directly calculating the Moisture Index as ratio of annual P/PET.
These layers were clipped to Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda with country shapefiles obtained from GADM 3.6.
Water areas were masked with a map of open water bodies available via this article. This map was resampled to 30 arc-seconds in QGIS with a threshold of 75% to classify water bodies.
These 43 layers were reduced to 18 layers with maximum Variance Inflation Factor of 11 with the BiodiversityR::ensemble.VIF function, resulting in the following set of variables:
- moisture index (VIF 10.53)
- maximum temperature of the coldest month (VIF 7.31)
- aridity Index Thorntwaite (VIF 6.18)
- PET driest quarter (VIF 5.77)
- PET wettest quarter (VIF 5.52)
- PET seasonality (VIF 4.57)
- BIO15 (precipitation seasonality, VIF 4.29)
- BIO3 (isothermality, VIF 4.24)
- topographic wetness index (VIF 4.13)
- BIO14 (precipitation of the driest month, VIF 3.97)
- BIO19 (precipitation of the coldest quarter, VIF 3.68)
- BIO18 (precipitation of the warmest quarter, VIF 3.05)
- topographic roughness index (VIF 2.55)
- BIO2 (mean diurnal range, VIF 2.53)
- silt (VIF 1.83)
- clay (VIF 1.76
- sand (VIF 1.48)
- count of the number of months with mean temp greater than 10 degrees C (VIF 1.10)
16 Agroecological zones were created.
The number of zones was inspired by the same number of zones used in an Atlas of African agriculture research and development (but also noting that the atlas included different tropical and subtropical zones, hence more zones are distinguished by the classification system in this App.)
These zones were named 1 to 16, based on sorting the centroids of each zone by moisture index and maximum temperature of the coldest month
An alternative name for these zones reflects the Moisture Index (MI) and the temperature of centroids:
Names starting with 'H' are for AEZ with centroid in a humid climate, defined by a MI >= 0.65.
Names starting with 'D' are for AEZ with centroid in a dry sub-humid climate, defined by 0.5 <= MI < 0.65.
Names starting with 'S' are for AEZ with centroid in a semi-arid climate, defined by 0.2 <= MI < 0.5.
Names starting with 'A' are for AEZ with centroid in a arid climate, defined by 0.05 <= MI < 0.2.
The number in the longer names refers to the maximum temperature of the coldest month
For example, AEZ 1 has the alternative name of H13 as the centroid has a MI of 1.19 and temperature of 13.0.
Calendar plots
Plots of calendars are created via ggplot2 by the App based on data entered from the published calendars.
The published calendars can be accessed via the link from the markers on the map.
Note that some calendars only contain information on fruit trees (these were the first calendars that were developed.)
Nutrients data
Food composition data
Food composition data were obtained from the Priority Food Tree and Crop Food Composition Database that was accessed in November 2020.
Recommended Nutrient Intakes (RNI)
Recommended Nutrient Intakes were obtained from the 1998 joint FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on Human Vitamin and Mineral Requirements for Vitamin A (Annex 2, fat-soluble vitamins), Vitamin C (Annex 2, water-soluble vitamins), Folate (Annex 2, water-soluble vitamins), Calcium (Annex 1) and iron (Annex 1, 15% bio-availability)
RNI values for Calcium for 0-6 month infants were for breastfed infants.
Recommended Nutrient Intakes were obtained from the 2020 Recommended Nutrient Intakes and Population Nutrient Intake Goals for the Caribbean for Potassium (Table 7), protein (Table 3) and dietary fibre (Table 3).
For nutrients included in the nutrition calendars (iron, vitamin A, vitamin C and folate), the thresholds for high (+++), source (++) and low sources corresponded to those used while developing the calendars .
For Calcium, Potassium and protein, the high (+++) and source (++) thresholds were directly obtained from GUIDELINES FOR USE OF NUTRITION CLAIMS: Section 8.6. The low (~) threshold was set at 5%, equal to the threshold used in the calendars.
Nutrient density scores
The calculation of the Hybrid Nutrient Density Scores followed the methodology described in: A proposed nutrient density score that includes food groups and nutrients to better align with dietary guidance.
Note that values were not available from the Priority Food Tree and Crop database for some of the qualifying and disqualifying nutrients.
Conform note a of Box 2, individual qualifying nutrients were maximum 100.
Botanical names of species
Botanical names of species and genera were checked against the v.2019.05 taxonomic backbone data of World Flora Online (WFO) via the WorldFlora package.
The botanical name is used to crosslink species to the Agroforestry Species Switchboard.
The App was developed by Roeland KINDT, CIFOR-ICRAF, 2020
Roeland Kindt also developed and executed all R scripts related to AEZ creation and species name checking
Main Architects: Roeland Kindt, Stepha McMullin, Ramni Jamnadass and Barbara Stadlmayer
Critical reviews were provided by Ian K Dawson, Lars Graudal and Jens-Peter Barnekow Lilleso
Data for portfolios shown in the calendars was entered in a spreadsheet by Eric Ngethe
The development of food portfolios was supported by IFAD and the EU
Funding was provided for development of the App by the CGIAR Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA) through its operational priority #3 of Enhanced nutrition and food security.
FTA's work is supported by the CGIAR Trust Fund.