University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program Funded Projects Database

Description of the Database Contents

You may search the database on the following terms.  A "glossary" of what these terms mean is provided below.  In particular, some explanation regarding the values contained in some of these database fields may be needed to facilitate your search.

Note: If you came here from the database search form, click your browser's "back" button to return to your form as you left it (same boxes checked, etc.).

• Principal Investigator (PI)
• Project Summary
• Program Area
• Commodity/Vegetation
• Research Location
• Project Topic
• Organic Relevance
• Publications

Principal Investigator (PI)    This individual is the project leader and main contact for more detailed information about the project.

Project Summary    Description of project goals, methods, results and impacts. Projects are classified as new (recently funded), in progress (multi-year projects that are still in progress), and final (project completed or final report submitted).

Program Area    SAREP classifies its funded projects in four main categories:

Crop and Livestock Production—projects that address production practices in crop and livestock systems either as separate components or in more integrated farming systems projects.

BIFS—the Biologically Integrated Farming Systems program funds collaborative projects providing extension services, training, and financial incentives for farmers who voluntarily participate in projects to reduce their use of agricultural chemicals (for more information see http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/bifs/).

Community Development and Public Policy—projects that work within the food system to build more sustainable communities, and increase local participation by local citizens; also includes projects addressing critical issues related to food and agricultural policy (for more information see http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/cdpp/).

Methyl Bromide Alternatives—projects funded through a special grants program supporting research and implementation of alternatives to methyl bromide (http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/mebralt/).

SAREP also provides small grants to support educational events and graduate student projects, but they are not currently included in this database.

Commodity/Vegetation   This field of the database identifies the particular crops or vegetation that are relevant to a project. The term none designates projects that are not commodity-oriented. The term non-specific is assigned to projects that provide information applicable across a wide range of commodities.

Research Location    This field identifies the county in which the project or research takes place. Note that this may be different from the location of the PI. "Statewide" means that the research was conducted in or generally applicable across many counties. "Not applicable" refers to projects where research location is not relevant to the project results.

Project Topic    Projects are also classified within the following general topical areas: Livestock Systems, Pest Management, Soil Management, Water Management, Integrated Farming Systems, Marketing, Urban Agriculture, Food/Ag Education, Public Policy, Econ/Social Analysis, Food Security/Community Development.  Projects can fall within multiple topical areas.

Organic Relevance    Many of the projects that SAREP funds look at the dynamics of organic production systems. Projects are assigned one of the following categories according to their relevance to organic agriculture: Direct (explicit organic experimental context; practices and materials researched allowed under National Organic Standards Board recommendations); Indirect (experimental context NOT explicitly organic, but practices and materials researched could be directly applied to organic farms); Neutral (project goals and context have no bearing on organic farming).

Publications   This field of the database includes references for any publications or educational materials that were based wholly or partially on this project. Please note that several projects funded by SAREP also receive significant funding from other sources.

More on searching the database

• Selecting/entering values to search on generally narrows down the number of projects found in a search, i.e. a project has to meet all criteria to be found.
• Selecting multiple values within a group of check boxes or selection list will broaden the search, eg. selecting both "Almond" and "Apple" within the Commodity list, you will find projects relevant to either almonds or apples.
• If you want all projects within a database field, don't specify any criteria for that field, eg. to find all commodities, don't select any Commodities.
• To select multiple values in a selection box (the vertical lists with scroll bars), hold down the Control key ("Apple" key on a Mac) and click on values to select/deselect them.  Most browsers also support selection of multiple items in a selection box by "dragging" the mouse over them.  Control + click + drag is the easiest way to select multiple records.  A little experimentation will give you the idea.
• The text boxes such as the one for "Title contains..." work on the basis of searching for a sub-string within the field, thus "straw" finds both "Strawberry" and "straw."  It doesn't matter if your sub-string is at the beginning, middle or end of the text you're trying to match.  For this reason, you'll probably find more records if you search on "apple" than "apples."
• Searches are not case sensitive.
• If you don't specify any criteria at all, all projects from the database will be listed.  There's nothing wrong with doing this, it will only take a few seconds to list all projects.