Sustaining our Soil for our Food

How much of the soil where your food comes from is made up of organic carbon?

This web app has been retired for lack of funding. You can read more about this and other work featured at https://dadeda.design/work.

Cheers, Kathryn

Capstone project web application prototype for graduate MPS in Data Analytics & Visualization degree, Maryland Institute College of Art. December 2021

Summary for Food Consumers

With 7.9 Billion humans on Earth as of November 2021, and an expected 10 Billion in the year 2057 (United Nations/Worldomter), as consumers we individually and collectively hold great potential to maintain and restore the grand resource of our soil, through purchasing power to support food producers and advocacy to policy makers. This project investigates the intersection of organic carbon storage in soil with climate change and food production sustainability. Its success measure is introducing people who buy and eat food to an appreciation of the importance of soil organic carbon content where foods they eat are produced, even if that land is far away.

The appeal of the interactive visual web tool is to compel consumers to further engage in their food chain and ecosystem roles, such as to learn about regenerative agriculture practices that build and maintain soil health and its storage of carbon matter as a valuable offset to carbon emissions, for which suggested action steps will be provided.

While debate and analysis continues worldwide about how effective soil carbon is in offsetting greenhouse gas emissions, likelihood grows that U.S. government certified voluntary environmental credit markets will be a reality with the progress of the Growing Climate Solutions Act of 2021. Meeting this bill’s directive will require the alignment of consumers at scale to reduce barriers to entry for food producers in adopting regenerative practices to earn monetary credits. By approaching soil carbon through food, this project adds a more everyday relatable human element in the increasing body of scientific material and visualization growing around soil health and its implications.

Comments and Questions / General Disclaimer

This research is completed academically by me, Kathryn Hurchla, and is not a reflection in any way of the data source references or their affiliates. I have made extensive efforts to assess and validate the data sources, and my own preparation of data for visualization in the web application, and I welcome your feedback. Please point out problems or discrepancies by opening an issue on the project's GitHub repository, or send questions or comments to me at khurchla@mica.edu or kathryn@dadeda.design.

Footnote: Source References

FAO/IIASA/ISRIC/ISS-CAS/JRC, 2012. Harmonized World Soil Database (version1.2), FAO, Rome, Italy and IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria. The primary data source of this project is Soil organic carbon density: SOCD5min.zip 5 minutes spatial resolution, available at http://globalchange.bnu.edu.cn/research/soilw below the table of the 34 Soil Properties.

FAO.STAT Trade: Detailed Trade Matrix: License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. Extracted from: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/TM All Data Normalized. Data of Access: 10-11-2021.

• App was deployed with Heroku and publicly available until 2023 at https://sustain-our-soil.kathrynhurchla.com/
• Roadmap at https://trello.com/b/26tohdzU/sustaining-our-soil-for-our-food-product-roadmap

Acknowledgments

Though being developed during a highly isolated and independent time socially, and entirely remote educational experience, learning to build this app wouldn't be possible without a circle of folks and resources I lean into for which I'm grateful. You've all inspired new directions and given legs to my work.

TLDR, fair warning unless you're my mom this is were I ramble on and you might the rest too long to read, want to skim the many folks who supported me, or fall off at this point. Cheers!

• Tatiana Garcia-Granados, Chief Operating Officer of The Common Market, whose hypothesis that data and artificial intelligence could be put to work to shift the behavior of all stakeholders in the food economy and ecosystem towards better soil health results. You inspired me to dive into this topic, and your team's delivery of local food for the common good is always an inspiration to me.

• my Capstone course Instructor Tracy Sanders especially for pressing me on important questions, their drive to support and challenge me in ways that would help me reach my roles. Tracy's professionalism and graciousness with me throughout the course and project as we navigated it during uncommon and difficult times supported my ability to be successful in advance studies and reach the finish line.

• Tracy's Course Collaborator Jes Standefer, whose own work inspired me and reminded me to focus on design and story elements to make a human connect. With the research brief that accompanies this app prototype, Jes' specific, articulate, and timely feedback and review of my drafts directly supported me in refining that for the review audience, with the appropriate level of detail and context, and during a timeline while I was lacking sleep affecting my cognitive abilities as I fought to wrap up all aspects of the project on time. Seriously, thank you.

• my Instructor for MICA Python workshops Lawrence Gray, PhD, who's become a mentor of mine and has supported me in collaboratively debugging code from Python to CSS and beyond as well as often shared with me much needed good old fashioned logic checks and balances and planning out what I am trying to accomplish when I get off track with relating the code to the outcome. You've been an insightful listening ear and accountability boost as I've grown my programming skills through your workshops, this project, and a professional website (I'm now more prepared to finish that!). Most importantly you've taught me that visualization has a place at every step of data work and doing so often helps with understanding data better. This is a core concept that's so relatable with my combination of experience and goals with visual and data work. It will make me a better 'data citizen', slow me down and prevent misgivings in my process, and it's a concept I will drive home for anyone who will listen!

• the MICA classmates in my cohorts for generous feedback, ideas, and the opportunity to participate in your visualization projects too through which I've learned much more. I had the unique opportunity to switch groups during the program, and am thankful for building closer ties with more colleagues to carry forward.

• Adam at Charming Data, and Plotly, for excellent instructional content being developed and shared regularly for the Python Plotly and Dash community. Check out the videos and support Adam's passion for growing a more inclusive and financially accessible developer community at patreon.com/charmingdata or sponsor the work on GitHub at Coding-with-Adam. I look forward to being part of this innovative community developing visual tools that stretch the limits of customization that excite me when I make things, and where there is great potential to connect super technical awesome data and AI projects to folks that really need to engage with them.

• Elias Dabbas and Packt> Publishing for putting out a great book on building Dash apps. Hey you can read it along with me or find it from other stores through goodreads.

• esteemed food producers and soil scientists doing the critical work and data collection for–and in–our soil–worldwide, and specifically Land-Atmosphere Interaction Research Group at Sun Yat-sen University for the thought, testing, and documentation you put into data harmonization across global datasets available to continue this work without delay at the speed of climate change. Soil and learning are resources we can never forget to nourish, and I hope this work honors and connects us all more with you and our land.

• my family who is held up highest for your openminded and intentional, though occasionally faltering or reluctant, love and humor throughout my graduate degree program over a long 18 months. I experienced love when I needed it most, often in the form of meals and hugs and patience during stretches when I could not join all of our routines together.

• each of the instructors and guest professionals who shared honest feedback on my work throughout the MICA program. My instructors Amy Cesal and Zander Furnas brought more of this critical gift of feedback through their industry challenge course and a guest speaker series, during which I was delighted to hear I was the first person to ask a seasoned color professional in the data and design world about browns—that discussion directly informed my design choiced for this project.

• Thomas Park for building the MORPH bootstrap style theme I customized for this app. Check out all Thomas's Bootswatch open source themes and other work at https://thomaspark.co/.

• Plotly and Dash community and forum members, and literally almost everyone on StackOverflow. I spent hours and hours among your brilliance and willingness to share your own hard worn solutions in https://community.plotly.com/ and https://stackoverflow.com/.

• and perhaps your name here to thank as this work progresses...