Data visualizations for energy and nutrient flows in farm systems for the Sustainable Farm Systems project

• In Event: Digital Maps and Visualizations for Research and Public Outreach

Abstract

In order to evaluate human-environment interactions in historical agro-ecosystems, the Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS) project has assembled comparable land use information from rural communities in three continents and across 200+ years of change. Researchers compare soil nutrient sustainability, energy flows, and landscape structures in each location in order to understand the process of agricultural modernization through the industrial revolution. One of the primary challenges is how to communicate findings in a standardized form that is suitable for researchers working in multiple languages, in Europe, North America, and Latin America, and across widely varied agricultural practices. Visualizations of key indicators, such as Sankey diagrams of Energy Return on Investment (EROI), have become a key part of this communication strategy, but the effort required to manually create dozens of charts from thousands of data points has become prohibitive. In this talk we will discuss how we created a system using open-source software that allows project members to easily create these and other visualizations by simply uploading spreadsheets. This has drastically reduced the amount of effort required to create the visualizations, and, because all the visualizations are created using the same system and are thus identical in format, allows for more accurate comparison of results from researchers working in different regions and/or time periods.

Author

• Joshua MacFadyen, Arizona State University