Combining biotechnologies and GIScience

In agriculture, livestock is presently facing important pressures chiefly due to modern farming. FAO estimates that one breed of traditional livestock dies out every week somewhere in the world. Loss of breeding stock by extinction and appearance of new diseases are in progress and ways have to be found to conserve diversity in livestock genetic resources. The Econogene project, supported by the European Union, banked on Geographical Information Science and biotechnologies complementarity to develop tools to measure, monitor and manage biodiversity. In the context of the analysis of relationships between environment and the genome, this paper describes the use of a method allowing the visual interpretation of a large amount of logistic regression models results (rejection tables). This approach is likely to suggest some avenues worth exploring with numerical analysis. This will then lead to the possible identification of specific roles for molecular markers, and eventually allow to take appropriate breeding measures