Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Giroux, Stacey A.
• Kouper, Inna
• Estes, Lyndon D.
• Schumacher, Jacob
• Waldman, Kurt
• Greenshields, Joel T.
• Dickinson, Stephanie L.
• Caylor, Kelly K.
• Evans, Tom P.

Titel

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

Ist Teil von

• Environmental modelling & software : with environment data news, 2019-09, Vol.119, p.57-69

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Access via ScienceDirect (Elsevier)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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. •Many geographic regions suffer from sparse social-environmental data resources.•Data collected from farmers via SMS can address gaps in social-environmental data.•Data gathered via SMS present unique quality, management, and use challenges.