Title: Ecological Footprint 2.0: Illustrating human harvest of the planet

Name: Lauren Tango
Mentor: Dr. Christopher Lant

This project is part of a greater National Science Foundation funded collaboration project designed to detail the food, energy, and water system in the United States. The goal of the project is ultimately to provide, “an empirical basis for advances in theory and scientific modeling of the complete food-energy-water (FEW) system of the United States” (NSF, 2019). My part in the project is connected to the amount of net primary productivity that humans harvest in the United States through major crops. The measurement for the human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP) is in gC/m2/year, and my research aims to visualize this on maps of the contiguous United States.
Data from the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Agricultural Statistics Service were synthesized to create a final data set that contains harvest data by county, by year, for alfalfa, corn, cotton, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat from 1980 to 2017. R programming software was used to clean and disaggregate the data, and GIS Software was used to visualize the results.
The results of this project show changes over time, distributions, and densities of harvests in the United States. The data and visualizations that were made as a result of this project are a part of the greater National Science Foundation project to help understand how much primary productivity humans harvest, and ultimately, where those products are used and consumed.