The Challenge
During socioeconomic disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals and governments are often concerned with the risk of disruptions in supply chains and logistics that could impact food security in a region or globally. There are many different types of factors to consider, including (but not limited to):
- Disruptions to moving materials and people across borders
- Regions or people hoarding goods
- Workers getting sick, resulting in interference with the food supply and humanitarian aid to countries that need it
- Potential changes in crop health due to shelter-in-place and altered traffic patterns
- Changes in crop and commodity prices
Space-based Earth observations and remotely sensed data can provide information about conditions on the ground that may affect food supply chains and food security. For example, the data can allow you to assess precipitation, soil moisture, groundwater, land cover, water stress, changes in agricultural food production systems, energy consumption, and other associated changes caused by the response to COVID-19.
Your challenge is to consider the journey of food to your plate, determine how disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic are affecting the food supply locally and globally, and propose solutions to address these issues!
Considerations:
- How is COVID impacting planting, harvesting, processing, and distribution of crops and livestock products across the world? What about fisheries? This challenge is not limited to food production on land.
- Are there significant regional impacts (e.g. if a resource or activity is limited in a region, interruptions or closures can have large regional impacts on farmers and consumers)?
- Consider an overlay of COVID incidents, workforce data, key farms, and/or livestock plants and distribution areas to show (geospatially) areas of risk to the food supply.
- Using Earth observations and remotely sensed data from GPM (precipitation), SMAP (soil moisture), GRACE (groundwater), MODIS/VIIRS/Landsat/Sentinel (surface characterization, surface emissions), and products from GEOS-5/MERRA-2, you can assess changes in water availability (water stress), changes in agricultural food production systems, energy consumption, and other associated changes caused by the response to COVID-19.
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