An access library for the world crop, food production and consumption datasets
This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Alison Eyres and Thomas Ball.
Agricultural habitat degradation is a leading threat to global biodiversity. To make informed decisions, it's crucial to understand the biodiversity impacts of various foods, their origins, and potential mitigation strategies. Insights can drive actions from national policies to individual dietary choices. Key factors include knowing where crops are grown, their yields, and food sourcing by country.
The FAOSTAT trade data offers comprehensive import and export records since 1986, but its raw form is complex, including double counting, hindering the link between production and consumption.
While Kastner et al. proposed a method[1] to address this, it has only been applied to 2013 data[2] so far. Creating a reproducible pipeline for processing FAO trade data across years is essential for assessing how global trade changes affect biodiversity. For instance, how has Brexit impacted the UK's food sourcing and biodiversity? What are the repercussions of emerging producers on ecosystems?
The summer project
There exists a Python faostat library to act as an interface to the raw CSV. And in 2024, a bunch of food hackers released AgriFoodPy [3] which is a package for modelling food systems.
In this project, we'd like to:
- port a bunch of R code to Python using faostat/agrifoodpy and verify the outputs are broadly the same
- determine strategies to incrementaly update and reproduce FAO data on top of these libraries so we can do more frequent updates and tailoring
- apply it to the code backing the "Quantifying the impact of the food we eat on species extinctions" paper
This would be a good summer project for a student interested in getting to grips with scientific computing, such as Python, Rscript, and dataframes libraries. If the core is done early, then we can investigate visualisations as well. And of course, if you're interested in sustainability, is this is a great topic to start on!
See also:
- AgrifoodPy food calculator at https://agrifood-consultation.streamlit.app/
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Kastner T, Kastner M, Nonhebel S (2011): Tracing distant environmental impacts of agricultural products from a consumer perspective. Ecol Econ 70:1032–1040.
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Schwarzmueller, F., Kastner, T. Agricultural trade and its impacts on cropland use and the global loss of species habitat. Sustain Sci 17, 2363–2377 (2022).
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Cordero, Juan P. et al. AgriFoodPy: a package for modelling food systems. Journal of Open Source Software (2024).
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ideasRelated News
- The Cambridge "Green Blue" competition to reduce emissions / Feb 2025
- Quantifying the impact of the food we eat on species extinctions / Feb 2025
- Mapping LIFE on Earth / Jan 2023