Mapping the U.S. Food-Energy-Water Nexus at the Mesocale: the FEW-View Visualization System

The FEWSION Project is an environmental data science project to build the first complete, empirical data-driven description of the U.S. food, energy, and water system (the FEW Nexus). The goal of the FEWSION Project is to produce FEW nexus data for researchers, decision-makers, and the public and to make this data accessible so that anyone in the U.S. can view the journey of their food, energy, and water. The FEWSION Project utilizes data fusion – the curated combination of multiple disparate datasets to create novel, synthetic datasets. There are numerous challenges to integrating food, energy, and water (FEW) system data. Chief among these challenges are data quality, availability, comprehensiveness, and accuracy. The first half of this presentation will discuss the FEWSION Project, the process of creating the FEWSION Database v. 1.0, and how we have made these data accessible. In the second half of this talk, there will be a demonstration of the FEW-View™ visualization system. FEW-View™ is an online educational tool built to visualize FEWSION Project data that is free and open to the public. Using FEW-View™, any U.S. resident and community leader can visualize their food, energy, and water supply chains.