2019

Author(s): Giroux SA, Kouper I, Estes LD, Schumacher J, Waldman K, Greenshields JT, Dickinson SL, Caylor KK and Evans TP

Collecting high-frequency social-environmental data about farming practices in sub-Saharan Africa can provide new insight into environmental changes that farmers face and how they respond within smallholder agro-eco-systems. Traditional data collection methods such as agricultural censuses are costly and not useful for understanding intra-annual and real-time decisions. Short-message service (SMS) has the potential to transform the nature of data collection in coupled social-ecological systems. We present a system for collecting, managing, and synthesizing weekly data from farmers, including data infrastructure for management of big and heterogeneous datasets; probabilistic data quality assessment tools; and visualization and analysis tools such as mapping and regression techniques. We discuss limitations of collecting social-environmental data via SMS and data integration challenges that arise when linking these data with other social and environmental data. In combination with high-frequency environmental data, such data will help ameliorate issues of scale mismatch and build resilience in environmental systems.

Journal: Environmental Modelling & Software