Category: GIS

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Food desert locator

Luigi and I had the same response to the USDA’s Food Desert Locator: wow!

[A] food desert [is] a low-income census tract where a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store.

Here’s a little section of the country.

FoodDesert

Astonishing in itself, what seems most thrilling is that the entire dataset is downloadable, which suggests all sorts of possible mash-ups: farmers’ markets, poverty, obesity, school journeys, Starbucks locations. The sky’s the limit. Not that correlation is causality, of course.

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Nibbles: GBIF, Grains, Sorghum, Carnival, ECP/GR, Rabbits, Conference, Satoyama

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Nibbles: Plectranthus, Roads, Fast food, Dog food, Hybrid rice, Mapping climate change, Turf, Cassava, iPhone app, Zizania, Rice

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Mapping aid

Thanks to CIAT’s Meike for news that

InterAction has just launched an interactive US Food Security Aid Map that provides detailed project-level information on food security and agriculture work being done by their member NGOs. The site can be browsed by location, sector, organization or project.

Here’s the map of agriculture projects: ((478 of 776 projects))

As coincidence would have it, one of the projects is the orange-fleshed sweet potato work we mentioned in a recent post.

Searching on “agrobiodiversity” yielded nothing, but there were a few hits with “diversification.” Well worth exploring in a bit more detail. If only to identify places where some pre-emptive germplasm collecting might be in order.

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Mapping drought risk

Just a quick follow-up to the rhyming couplet on water-related stresses in the just-published Brainfood. The Center for Hazards and Risks Research (CHRR) at Columbia University, which we have mentioned here before in connection with tsunami risk, also has data on Global Drought Hazard Distribution.

With a little R-related effort by Robert ((Ok, ok, I’m installing it!)) you can get a Google Earth file, which looks like this for Asia. ((I know, the colours are a bit funny. But basically, orange and cream are bad. Working on that.)) I’ve also added MODIS fire hotspots for the past 24 hours, merely because I can. That would be the little fire icons.

And that means you can mash up drought risk with germplasm origin (from Genesys, say), in this case from Chad as an example.

Which is a great thing to be able to do because as we have just had reconfirmed by our friend Dag Endresen, the origin of germplasm allows you to make some predictions about its performance.