Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
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-ecosystems. 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.
Publication Title
Environmental Modelling and Software
Publication Date
9-2019
Volume
119
First Page
57
Last Page
69
ISSN
1364-8152
DOI
10.1016/j.envsoft.2019.05.011
Keywords
farming, food security, high frequency data, short message service (SMS), Sub-Saharan Africa
Repository Citation
Giroux, Stacey A.; Kouper, Inna; Estes, Lyndon; Schumacher, Jacob; Waldman, Kurt; Greenshields, Joel T.; Dickinson, Stephanie L.; Caylor, Kelly K.; and Evans, Tom P., "A high-frequency mobile phone data collection approach for research in social-environmental systems: Applications in climate variability and food security in sub-Saharan Africa" (2019). Geography. 61.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/61
Copyright Conditions
Contains the accepted pre-print version.
