You Are Invited…. To our Cassava Map Viewing Party After-Party
To the tunes of Cumbia and Cassava chips crunching, the Harvest Choice team convened a cassava map viewing party in hopes of mining our collective knowledge for information to validate our SPAM outputs, specifically, "Area Harvested Cassava" in Sub Saharan Africa.
With the presence of our visitor, the encyclopedic Chris Legg, and his expertise in cassava cultivation in Africa, we explored a .kml file SPAM Area harvested of cassava on Google Earth country by country and evaluated the plausibility of reported SPAM results. We recorded our collective findings on new polygons created in Google Earth and attached comments.
In the spirit of experimental innovation, you are invited to join in on the discussion. Where do you think cassava is grown? In the links below we provide viewing access to SPAM results for cassava: area harvested.
The first map is a raster covering per-pixel harvested area cassava. The second is an example of how to collect comments about the data by drawing overlaying polygons over problematic or exceptional areas of accuracy. Feel free to browse both, open in Google Earth, then create a "Feedback Polygons" layer of your own.
Here's a suggested framework to guide your polygon creation in Google Earth. Most important is to leave a detailed comment in the description box of every new feature explaining WHY you agree / disagree with the data. Please be as specific as possible. Lastly, save and export your .kml file from Google Earth, then email back a copy to Harvest Choice which will serve as the central repository.
Polygon codings:
- Red - I don't think so: There is likely a problem here
- Yellow - Maybe: Data needs a second look
- Green - That looks about right
Any comments, questions, or feedback (thank you!) can be sent to: s.crespo@cgiar.org
In the near future we hope to formalize the implementation of these kinds of feedback systems, then immediately feed collective feedback back into the re-running of our SPAM model.
In the meantime, we invite you to hold your own mini-map viewing party, download and open the .kmz files in google earth, create "Commenting" polygons of your own, then send it back to us.