HESTIA: A harmonized way to represent, share, and analyse agri-environmental data
Joseph Poore
- Start Wednesday 26 Jan 2022 10:00am
- Finish Wednesday 26 Jan 2022 11:00am
Abstract: Enabling farmers and food processors to measure their environmental impacts and productivity and communicate this information up supply chains, while also providing researchers with greater access to consistent producer-specific data, would support improvements in agricultural productivity and sustainability. In this seminar, I will present a consistent and unambiguous format to represent agri-environmental data describing specific farms and food supply chains. Using test datasets, our format can represent data describing diverse producers and preserve high levels of detail from the original sources. I will also describe a software toolkit that automatically validates, augments, and calculates environmental impact indicators from these data. Finally, I will present an open-access data platform (https://hestia.earth) which currently stores data from over 250 public sources in this format. To demonstrate the platform, we will use a survey of 935 maize-pigeon pea farms to demonstrate the process. This work creates a new resource for researchers and builds part of the digital foundations for more sustainable food supply chains.