About Tiddi

Tiddi is a locust observatory for India’s Scheduled Desert Area. It answers one question: is this district at risk. Live points are FAO Locust Hub (RAMSES) — Locust Warning Organisation field surveys that reached Rome. Not a press monitor. Not a satellite detection product. Not an official LWO or FAO forecast.

The public site is tiddi.in. Tiddi is Hindi for locust. The parent studio is Maplore.

What a survey means

A nil is a field visit. An officer stood there and recorded absence. Recession with hundreds of nils is the live product, not an empty feed. Amber is reserved for adults, hoppers, swarms, or bands.

Breeding conditions

Satellites do not see locusts. Olive spots are field-recorded greening or wet-soil surveys from RAMSES — all of them no locust — not a satellite detection. Historical hoppers sit on the map as breeding evidence, labelled as such. SISTEMA and NDVI rasters are not in this layer.

History on the map

The History segment is FAO-cited journeys, drawn so you can stand in the distance: a day’s wind from Jaisalmer (usually 5–130 km; FAO also cites ~150 km when vegetation dries), the Red Sea (~300 km), 1954 to the British Isles, 1988 Cape Verde to the Caribbean (first recorded Atlantic crossing), and India 2020. Paths are schematic except where landfall is documented. This is a wayback on the map, not GPS of a named swarm.

Guide

The Guide is the field book: species, phases, how a swarm starts, India, crops, food security, climate, labs. Map, timeline, and Guide are one instrument. Encarta, indexed on the Thar.

Where the numbers come from

LWO field officer (eLocust3) → Jodhpur → DLIO QC into RAMSES → FAO DLIS Rome → Locust Data Cube. Hub dots are ground surveys. FAO: current satellites cannot detect locusts or swarms.

Drift cones stay hidden unless ingest sees an active swarm or band in the last 21 days. There are none in the current Hub view. The 2020 archive is an opt-in map preset: historical district paths, labelled historical — not flight tracks, not a reanalysis.

Maplore

Maplore builds live maps for biothreats. Tiddi is the first instrument. After this observatory is sharp: a lite page that runs on a farmer’s phone in the SDA for crowdsourced spotting, then other modes (bioacoustics, sensors). Not on this site yet. Flying pests first; microbial and the rest of the stack are the studio, not this page.

Sources

• FAO Desert Locust Information Service / Locust Hub (RAMSES) — fao.org/locusts
• Locust Warning Organisation (GoI), Directorate of Plant Protection — ppqs.gov.in

Hub licence: non-commercial use with FAO acknowledgement. This site does not imply FAO or LWO endorsement, and it is not an official forecast.

Tiddi is a Maplore observatory · tiddi.in