Assessing the productivity and resource-use efficiency of underutilised crops: Towards an integrative system

Crops For the Future Research Centre (CFFRC) is currently developing CropBASE—a cross-cutting web-based platform for decision support and knowledge sharing on underutilised crops and their end uses. It provides a quantitative basis to compare underutilised crop productivity and resource-use-efficiency with that of major crops and cropping systems under current and future climate scenarios, and will include interactive tools to integrate underutilised crop data with geo-referenced information in existing and new databases. Specific crop application models form the analysis engine of CropBASE, including crop-climate, crop-quality, crop-economic models to assess agroecological suitability, nutritional value, livelihood or food security potential of underutilised crops and products at field, farm and regional scales. A geospatial information system framework will link currently available climate databases as input data for crop models. CFFRC, already using major models for a range of crops around the world under the AgMIP program, will spearhead the inclusion of specific underutilised crops into recognised crop models. After briefly introducing CropBASE, this paper presents use cases as examples comparing yield and water productivity predictions for bambara groundnut (an underutilised African legume) and pearl millet (an alternative major cereal) under current and future climate scenarios in contrasting sub-Saharan African locations.