Data science for sustainable global food systems

向可持续的全球粮食系统过渡是21世纪世纪的一项重大挑战。我们需要减少现有的饥饿和营养不良，同时在2050年之前为预计增加的20亿人提供食物，同时减少农业的环境足迹，并使农业更具气候适应力。为了应对这一挑战，提出了许多相互竞争的解决方案，在那些赞成通过可持续集约化增加粮食产量的人之间，以及使用精确农业和基因工程与那些赞成粮食主权和农业生态生产方法的人之间存在争议。我认为，这场辩论的一个潜在原因是，对话仍然是全球性的和抽象的，缺乏当地的背景，并寻找灵丹妙药。为了克服这些问题，我建议开发数据和分析工具，以探索粮食系统可持续性解决方案，这些解决方案取决于环境，系统集成，并包含多种选择。我计划通过以下方式做到这一点：1）使用以前开发的数据融合方法开发关键的新的全球和区域农业土地利用数据集; 2）使用系统审查和荟萃分析来审查替代耕作系统的有效性; 3）通过进一步开发一个基于网络的工具，探索当地有效的和依赖于环境的农业系统干预措施，（4）开发区域规模的情景模型，以探索综合粮食系统解决方案。通过这项研究，我希望确定实现可持续和气候适应性粮食系统的途径，明确考虑当地和区域背景，采用多种农业和粮食系统解决方案，并研究综合解决方案。

Transitioning to a sustainable global food system is a major challenge for the 21st century. We need to reduce existing hunger and malnutrition, while feeding an additional 2 billion people expected by 2050, at the same time as reducing agriculture's environmental footprint, and making agriculture more climate resilient. Many, competing, solutions have been proposed to address this challenge, and a contentious debate ranges between those in favor of increasing food production through sustainable intensification, and the use of precision agriculture and genetic engineering versus those favoring food sovereignty and agroecological production methods. I propose that a potential reason for this debate is because the conversations remain global and abstract, bereft of local contexts, and looking for panaceas. To overcome these issues, I propose to develop data and analytical tools to explore food system sustainability solutions that are context-dependent, system integrated, and embrace a diversity of options. I plan to do this by: 1) developing critical new global and regional agricultural land use data sets using previously developed data fusion methods: 2) using systematic reviews and meta-analyses to examine the effectiveness of alternate farming systems; 3) exploring locally-effective and context-dependent farming system interventions by further developing a purposely-built web-based tool, and 4) develop regional-scale scenario models to explore integrated food system solutions. Through this research, I hope to identify pathways toward sustainable and climate-resilient food systems that explicitly consider local and regional contexts, embrace a diversity of farming and food system solutions, and examine integrated solutions.