About
This visualization system maps food flows between counties in the United States. Note that there are three categories of relationships that can exist between counties:
- Food outflows only
- Food outflow only indicates that the selected county only sends food to the highlighted counties.
- Food inflows only
- Food inflow only indicates that the selected county only receives food from the highlighted counties.
- Both inflows and outflows
- Both food inflows and outflows indicate that the selected county receives and sends food to the highlighted counties.
Note that the list of partner counties and the color scale changes with each county selection.
Glossary:
- FIPS code
- Numeric identifier for each county in the United States
- Food outflow
- Total mass flux out of a county
- Food inflow
- Total mass flux into a county
- Food net flow
- Food inflow - Food outflow
- Units
- mass [kg]
- Year
- 2012
Methods:
This information is generated by the Food Flow Model, a data-driven methodology to estimate spatially explicit food flows. The Food Flow Model integrates machine learning, network properties, production and consumption statistics, mass balance constraints, and linear programming. A full description of the methods used to generate county-to-county food flows in the United States is provided in the accompanying academic journal article (Lin et al, 2019).
Citation:
Lin, X., P.J. Ruess, L. Marston, and M. Konar (2019) Food flows between counties in the United States, Environmental Research Letters, Vol 14, Issue 3, pp. 084011, doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae
Funding
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Grant No. ACI-1639529(‘INFEWS/T1: Mesoscale Data Fusion to Map and Model the US Food, Energy, and Water (FEW)System’) and CBET- 1844773 (‘CAREER: A National Strategy for a Resilient Food Supply Chain’).
Contact information
Megan Konar
Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
mkonar@illinois.edu
Michael McKelvey
Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education
College of Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
mmckelve@illinois.edu