This project examined the greenhouse gas emissions associated with various types of food. “Food-miles” refers to how far a product has traveled from its source to the consumer, including through processing stages. Their research question can be summarized as: What are the “GHG emissions associated with the production, transportation, and distribution of food consumed by American households”? The results of this study come from a model that is based on economic demands and the kilometers traveled through chains of custody for various types of food. Data on food demand came from the USDA. The second type of data was obtained from public records from the U.S. Commodity Flow Survey, and roughly converted to carbon dioxide emissions per dollar spent, based on fuels and transportation type used (truck versus ship, for example). Their models yielded results for several aspects of production and consumption, such as the amount of a product consumed per household per year, and the emissions of carbon dioxide per dollar spent. To put it simply, grains, fruits and vegetables were consumed in greater quantities overall, so require more transportation per household, but red meat and dairy products show extremely high emissions per unit consumed. Even though their models made some very broad assumptions concerning nationwide consumption, the results show such intense differences for certain food groups that the researchers concluded that choice in types of food has just as much of a climate impact as choice to buy locally produced food.

Weber, C. L., Mathews, S. (2008). Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States. Environmental science and technology, 10, (42) 3508–3513.             Retrieved at http://mmm.comuv.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Food-       Miles-and-the-relative-impacts-of-food-choices-Weber-and-Matthews-2008.pdf

The purpose of this research was to find what types of food markets are available in three communities, and the quality of the food provided at these locations. The study areas were chosen based on their demographic representation of income and race in Los Angeles. The data collection was fairly simple, consisting of recording where any sources of food were located, and what type of source, such as a supermarket, convenience store, fast food outlet, sit-down restaurant, food truck etc. At relevant locations, they also recorded what specific foods were available, which they hose from a USDA list of “low cost and healthy foods,” called the Thrifty Food Plan. They also conducted a couple of focus group interviews to gain some insight to the experiences of residents of the study areas. The data analysis was just descriptive. The article’s background description established that supermarkets are the best source of healthy foods that re preventative of obesity-related health problems, but they found that supermarkets made up less than two percent of the available food sources in these areas. Additionally, supermarkets were found to have 100% of the foods listed on the Thrifty Food Plan, while convenience stores (which were second most common after fast food), were found to have around half of these items, but always carried low-nutrition snack foods. They found in their focus groups that there are several barriers to getting healthy food, mainly cost and distance, so the interviewees mostly ate fast food. They conclude that food access is, indeed, “a problem in urban Los Angeles.”

Azuma, A. M., Gilliland, S., Vallianatos, M., Gottlieb, R. (2010). Food Access, Availability, and Affordability in 3 Los Angeles Communities, Project CAFE, 2004-2006. Preventing chronic disease: Public health research, practice and policy, 7 (2). Retrieved at http://scholar.oxy.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=uep_faculty

This report is from a World Bank project to learn more about sustainable global food production. The topic of this extensive research is how urban farming contributes to health, food security, and economic standing in poor neighborhoods and/or poor countries. This research takes the form of case studies of urban agriculture in four cities: Accra, Ghana; Bangalore, India; Lima, Peru, and Nairobi, Kenya. This report seeks to answer several research questions, including, generally speaking, what do residents of selected neighborhoods report eating, what effect do “producers” (people working for urban farms) report their farm has on the surrounding community, and what can be done to better serve these communities. The data-gathering aspect of this research consisted mainly of interviews with people, as well as demographic data obtained from surveys or previous census years if applicable. For each city they tried to find patterns, especially in the responses of producers, in order to see if there were any common factors that are limiting food production in these areas, such as inadequate access to clean water or simply not having enough space. They also found that urban agriculture as a source of employment had a significant effect on communities. While this an organizational report and not from the usual type of publication we’ve been reviewing, it follows much of the same research structure, although it aims to assess a much more complex research topic.

Reference: World Bank, Urban Development and Resilience Unit. (2013). Urban Agriculture: Findings From Four Case Studies. Urban Development Series Knowledge Papers, 18. Retrieved at https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/16273/807590NWP0UDS00Box0379817B00PUBLIC0.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

I found this research proposal on a site called academia.edu because it was hard to find any research proposals at all on my subject, and I did not really have any previous knowledge to build on. This proposal is from a student at UC San Diego, and as the title implies the topic is food deserts. This research project would answer several questions. How many households in southeast San Diego have moderate, low, an extremely low access to affordable healthy foods? What do residents report would improve their communities’ food situations? And, are people of color disproportionately living in low access neighborhoods? The proposal consists of an abstract, background information from previous studies on food deserts, the significance of the research, the research design, and appendices including interview questions that would be asked. There are several types of data that need to be gathered, and the proposal suggests gathering reports from the USDA data on food insecurity as well as from store owners/managers and residents via surveys and interviews. It would also require census data for southeast San Diego to learn about racial and ethnic diversity. The responses and results from these sources will be analyzed based on distribution of responses to surveys and how closely these are related to the racial makeup of communities.

The proposal also suggests sharing interview responses and the end results with decision-makers in the city of San Diego in order to have information to be able to improve food security in this area. I think it is important that the researcher proposes to ask residents what they think would improve their community rather than trying to shape policy from only an outside perspective. If carried out, this research would be a step towards giving people of this community a voice in important issues, and if not that, it would at least get participants thinking about these issues.

This sample proposal can be found at: http://www.academia.edu/1479455/Research_Proposal_SAMPLE_Assessing_Food_Insecurity_Food-Access_Inequality_In_Southeast_San_Diego_Households

The topic of this article is planning cities to make room in space and policies for urban agriculture, because it has a range of social and environmental benefits. This research focuses on the planning strategies of two Pacific northwest cities: Portland and Vancouver. The research question is “How does each city’s use of land inventories in urban planning affect its success in realistically supporting urban agriculture?” In urban planning, land inventories basically mean that planners are taking into account what land is available for future development and what uses that land should have to accommodate the growth of the city. This involves general plans and specific policies on zoning. The data collected consisted of information on each city’s policies, projects, and committees that had anything to do with urban agriculture, which is a combination of organizational data from the cities, and reports of events regarding what actually happened in each city and at specific urban agriculture sites. Their analysis was of the cities both individually and compared to one another. Since there was no numerical data collected, the analysis was qualitative. They found that overall, Portland’s policies and practices were more effective, the most obvious difference being that Portland involved more institutions than just the city itself. Both cities, however, showed that public policy that takes natural resources, like soil components, into account with the goal of sustainability can accomplish a lot.

Reference: Mendes, W., Balmer, K., Kaethler, T., & Rhoads, A. (2008). Using Land Inventories to Plan for Urban Agriculture: Experiences From Portland and Vancouver. Journal of the American Planning Association, 74(4), 435-449. doi:10.1080/01944360802354923

This study on the effectiveness of opening a new grocery store to address food insecurity was published in Health Affairs by Cummins, Flint, and Mathews. The research question was “Does opening up a grocery store in a Philadelphia neighborhood classified as a food desert have an effect on ‘ body mass index (BMI), daily fruit and vegetable intake, and perceptions of food accessibility’ in the community?” This indicates the three data types needed: height and weight for BMI (in this case a report of an “act/event”); reported fruit and vegetable intake, and; shallow opinions of various aspects of food accessibility in the neighborhood. These were collected from samples of two neighborhoods with similar characteristics, one that was planned to receive a new store and one that was not as a control.  Each neighborhood had two survey samples taken: one several years before the new grocery store was added, and one six months after it was added. They also compared participants within the experimental group who adopted the new store as their main source of food versus those who did not. The three types of data collected describe different things, and take the forms of both ratio and ordinal data. I can’t quite follow how they went from the data they collected to the data shown in their results, which seems to be all in ratios that were in a form that could be compared. The results of this study show that in the experimental neighborhood perception of food accessibility improved, but the measurements of BMI and fruit and vegetable intake overall did not change. One significant reason for this was that most people in the neighborhood did not actually change their shopping habits with the addition of the store. Another reason for this could be that the follow-up data collection was only performed six months after the store was introduced, not giving enough time for a change to occur. Nonetheless, I think it is significant that people did not change their shopping habits, and this perhaps indicates a need for further measures to address food deserts, such as nutrition education, in addition to bringing grocery stores to places that don’t have them.

Reference: Steven Cummins, Ellen Flint and Stephen A. Matthew. (2014). New Neighborhood Grocery Store Increased Awareness Of Food Access But Did Not Alter Dietary Habits Or Obesity. Health Affairs. 33, no.2 (2014):28N3-291. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2013.0512

The title of this article in Ecological Restoration also happens to be a research question: “Should Coral Fragments Collected for Restoration be Subdivided to Create More, Smaller Pieces for Transplanting?” Rephrased a bit to tell the researcher more about data, it would be “Do smaller coral fragments have a higher success rate for reef restoration than larger fragments?” The topic is reef restoration, and the data they were seeking was coral growth, which is an event/act, which they gathered by detached observation. Going more in-depth, they gathered fragments of coral that had already been broken off of their original colonies by storms, and transplanted them to a different reef. To compare larger versus smaller fragment growth, they matched their fragments by size and split one half of the pair into several small pieces and left the other intact, then attached them close together on the new reef, tagging each individual fragment. They measured the surface area of each fragment after three and twelve months. They analyzed this data comparatively by cross-tabulating the amounts of experimental coral versus control coral that survived, and found that in their experiment the smaller fragments were less likely to survive than the larger ones.

This research was relatively easy to match to the six research design steps, and the method was easy to follow, knowing a little bit about coral propagation. It seems like a very easy and replicable experiment, but the actual work of transplanting and monitoring takes up a lot of resources. Also, it would have been better to check back on the coral after several years as well as several months, because as it is, they only learned about oral survival, and not whether smaller or larger fragments grew quicker, as coral is very slow-growing. For short-term restoration, at least, larger fragments seem to definitely be better.

Forrester, G., Dauksis, R., & Ferguson, M. (2013). Should Coral Fragments Collected for Restoration be Subdivided to Create More, Smaller Pieces for Transplanting? Ecological Restoration, 31(1), 4-7. doi:10.3368/er.31.1.4

The article I found in the library is titled “Plant Community Recovery following Restoration in Temporally Variable Riparian Wetlands,” done by Meyer, Whiles and Baer and published in Restoration Ecology in 2010. The research topic was the effectiveness of river/wetland restoration projects done on the Platte river, which is located within the Great Plains, with the study area in southern Nebraska. Over three years they monitored several sites that had been restored at various times, including three natural sites that had never been disturbed for comparison. Their research question was “[Do] measures of community structure (richness, diversity) …increase with time since restoration [of wetlands]?” They found that over time the restored wetlands indeed had more plants, but that undisturbed wetlands and older restored wetlands actually had less richness and diversity than newly restored wetlands. I would put their data into the category of events/acts, as they were measuring mainly plant growth and water levels, which are things that happen. They gathered this data through observation of the sites, visiting them at certain intervals to count numbers and species of plants at each site. They used various forms of statistical analysis to compare the plant communities of the sites with each other and over time. Another significant finding from this research was that there were many challenges in getting a comparison of the wetlands based only on time since restoration, because there were many other variables in this natural experiment, such as soil composition, precipitation differences and management. Even though this study faced a lot of challenges, the resulting findings that diversity actually did not increase over time seems valid and interesting to me, and I think it could potentially be a part of a broader study of how to go about restoring and managing wetlands in this particular area, answering a “how to” research question.

Reference:

Meyer, C.K., Whiles, M.R., Baer S.G. (2008). Plant community recovery following restoration    in temporally variable riparian wetlands. Restoration Ecology. 18(1), 52-64. doi:10.1111/j.1526-100x.2008.00451.x