Visualizations help make sense of supply chain processes

Sandy Dall’erba is on a mission to systematically complement his published scientific research with visual tools, so it can be seen and easily understood by lay people, including policymakers.

“I’ve had the feeling for a while that if researchers continue to simply publish their academic work in reviews, which are ultra specialized, where we are evaluated and read by our peers, we only do half of the job,” said Dall’erba, Ph.D., a professor in the University of Illinois Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics and Founding Director of the Center for Climate, Regional, Environmental and Trade Economics (CREATE). “I really believe that on questions related to climate change, agriculture and food, we need to reach out to the general public.”

Dall’erba studies environmental and agricultural economics in general and the economic impact of climate change on the agrifood system in particular. His recent work involves examining the flow of agricultural commodities from country to country. He also aims to understand how we use natural resources to support that global supply chain of food and commodities, especially water resources as climate change brings more drought to some agricultural regions around the globe.

[Video1 Caption: In this video, Dall’erba’s research team presents the trade of agricultural and food commodities worldwide. Each flow corresponds to the value of agricultural and food products.]

“A visual tool is worth a million words when you want to translate complex academic work in a way that is palatable and exciting,” he said. Dall’erba acknowledges he’s more comfortable doing science than public outreach. Fortunately, he found David Bock, lead visualization programmer at U. of I.’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and an expert at creating scientific visualizations that bring science to life for general audiences.

Dall’erba and Bock teamed up after Dall’erba saw another scientific video by Bock depicting air flows across the Amazon. He found it easy to grasp the important concepts of that work, even though it was outside his field of expertise and knew he wanted to work with Bock. The two began collaborating supported by funding Dall’erba had from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They’ve been able to continue their partnership with funding from Illinois Computes, a program that offers NCSA’s computing, visualization and data resources and expertise to university researchers in any field.

Illinois Computes is a great opportunity for researchers, not only like Sandy but all over the campus, including the arts and humanities. Researchers can work with NCSA for visualization support as well as machine time or storage or help tuning code.

– David Bock, NCSA Lead Visualization Programmer

Bock usually works with scientific data sets comprised of data from natural phenomena, for example, air temperature or water vapor in the air. Those visualizations are typically laid out in a three-dimensional grid. Each cell in the grid has a data value, and Bock’s custom visualization renderer picks up the data values from each cell to create a “picture” of the data. By comparison Dall’erba’s data of 40,000 entries was unusual.

“He came to me with this big spreadsheet of every country in the world, exporting to every other country in the world,” Bock recalled. “I’ve never worked with that type of data on a global scale. With 40,000 different flows, we obviously couldn’t show them all at once. It made us both think outside of the box.”

Bock and Dall’erba have developed two videos so far. One shows the movement of agricultural commodity exports across countries and continents. It depicts a 3D globe, with the flow of agricultural exports from the country of origin to their destinations represented as arrows. The wider the arrow in its trajectory, the higher the value of the exported commodity. To prevent the visualization from looking too busy – like a massive ball of string unwinding – the arrows fade out as the globe slowly spins to focus on different regions and continents. The second visualization uses the same spinning globe technique, but instead of illustrating the value of commodities and their export trajectories, it shows the amount of water used in the trade of agricultural and food commodities. The two visualizations are also embedded into a longer video, in which Dall’erba discusses the global food supply chain, water resources needed for food production and how climate change could threaten water resources.  

[Video 2 Caption: In this video, Dall’erba’s research team presents the total amount of water embedded in the trade of agricultural and food commodities. The red and orange areas represent the water-scarce areas.]

In this video, Dall’erba’s research team presents the total amount of water embedded in the trade of agricultural and food commodities. The red and orange areas represent the water-scarce areas.

The demand for food by a growing world population has resulted in about 70% of water resources being allocated to agricultural uses such as irrigation, explained Dall’erba. The water use visualization shows the amount of water needed to produce and export agrifood products, with thicker trajectories representing greater embedded water exports, sometimes from places already suffering from water scarcity.

“At the end of the day, when you are growing crops, when you are feeding the livestock with those crops, or when you are manufacturing food, one of the primary and necessary components is water,” said Dall’erba. “Whether it comes from rain or it’s irrigated, like in the southwestern U.S., water is part of the story.”

The visualization of the movement of exports presents Dall’erba’s data from a global perspective, said Bock, capturing the big picture of food exports, what countries and regions are major exporters, and what regions and counties they export to. The second video underscores a problem that could get worse with climate change. Translating the value of commodities into the water resources used to produce and export them shows that many dry regions – such as the southwest U.S., Mexico, parts of southern Europe and Australia – are essentially exporting huge amounts of water.

“It’s amazing the massive infrastructure and the energy it takes to keep this whole supply chain functioning,” said Dall’erba. “I’m hoping we can make people more aware that the food we consume is actually resources, sometimes local resources, but sometimes resources from a faraway country.”

Dall’erba included early versions of the videos in a presentation to his USDA funders at a Washington, D.C., event in summer 2023.

“They all loved it,” he recalled. “They understood the value right from the first 10 seconds of the video. They didn’t even need to see the full three and a half minutes to get it.”

The videos are now available on the CREATE website and will be featured this November in a presentation by Dall’erba to several hundred economists and other social scientists during his Presidential address at the North American Regional Science Council conference. Now that Dall’erba has a tool that communicates his work more effectively than bar graphs and pie charts, he hopes to continue working with Bock to visualize a variety of supply chain phenomena.

[Video 3 Caption: In this video, Professor Sandy Dall’erba from the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign talks about the main challenges faced by the global agrifood supply chain and its water requirements.]

He and Bock are submitting a new project proposal to Illinois Computes, which will focus on the food supply chain within the U.S. They’d like to visualize different segments of the supply chain – for example, the flow of wheat across the country – and the different processing steps needed to move agricultural commodities along the farm-to-fork journey.

“Obviously, we are not eating live chickens; that chicken goes through various steps before it ends up on our plate,” said Dall’erba. “We’ll be showing each of those steps, trying to get as close as we can to that farm-to-fork journey. I think people will be excited about understanding where their food is coming from.”

Dall’erba said every showing of his videos is an advertisement for the University of Illinois and the unique resources offered by NCSA through Illinois Computes. Bock said his collaboration with Dall’erba demonstrates to other researchers that NCSA can be a resource even if they don’t work with extremely large data sets or have the need for high-performance machines.

“Sandy was someone who maybe wouldn’t have been drawn to a high-performance computing center like NCSA, but many fields can benefit from visualization,” said Bock. “I hope (researchers) realize that every field has its own visual language.  We’re able to work together to develop that visual language because of Illinois Computes. We’ve figured out how to speak visually with this kind of data.”

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