Spatial Analysis

It sounds a little like the popular fairytale. A researcher searches out datasets only to find them too small or too incomplete, too this or not enough that...the perfect fit of appropriate scale, detail and reliability eluding her (or his) desires. The researcher begins to sympathize and thinks to herself, maybe Goldilocks wasn’t so spoiled after all.

The June 2012 issue of Insights, IFPRI’s quarterly magazine, talks up HarvestChoice’s increasingly popular online tool: MAPPR. So friendly to use that a writer and a graphics designer combined wits to create the MAPPR-generated visuals for the article.

SPAM2000 (any version) is based on a large set of data which centers as much as possible on the year 2000: land cover / land use (Boston University’s MODIS-derived land cover 2000 and JRC’s GLC2000), crop suitability (Global AEZ Zones 2000 by FAO and IIASA), irrigated areas (FAO and CESR of University of Kassel), population density (CIESIN), and, most importantly, national and sub-national crops statistics for 2000.

To facilitate the exchange of HarvestChoice-developed datasets and analysis results with broader geospatial community, a standard/systematic global grid database was developed for multiple spatial resolutions (from 1 degree to 30 arc-second). The new grid database, called HCID, can be used as a key identifier that links and harmonizes various themes of raster datasets as well as aggregates them even at multiple resolutions. This can be helpful not only for GIS analysts but also for researchers who would need to handle the datasets in relational database management systems.

Many of HarvestChoice’s spatial analyses are done using raster datasets at various spatial resolutions (e.g., 1 km, 10 km, or 50 km grids).