Abstract

Conquering the Beast: Management and Visualization of Ag-Statistics Over Time
Track: Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Affairs
Authors: Susana Crespo

The International Food Policy Research Institute's HarvestChoice program and SpatialDev have developed a platform to geo-reference and process agricultural production statistics at the sub-national level.

Changing administrative units over time present a typical challenge for mapping statistics of any kind. This platform leverages the yearly availability of the FAO's Global Administrative Unit Layers database (GAUL) and the power of the five-minute grid-cell to anchor important statistics to place, thereby providing a crucial input into the SPAM (Spatial Production Allocation Model) Model and informing economic food security policy worldwide.

This evolving project lies at the confluence of powerful tools such as MS SQL, Python, arcpy.mapping, ArcGIS Desktop, ArcSDE, and ArcServer.