At times, making progress on a research project can feel like an uphill battle. Often, progress moves along slowly with momentary bursts forward. Throughout a project, it is also common to reach a dead end. In this case it is good to take a moment to reflect and then to pivot into a new direction.
Recently, I reached one of these dead ends in my project involving virtual water trade. Initially, our goal was to create a network of the actual virtual water flows of all fifty states, which has been completed, and also to create a model which would represent the effects of an implementation of urban agriculture on the virtual water flow network. However, modeling urban agriculture has proven to be difficult to do accurately. We tried models involving an increase in self consumption to reflect urban agriculture. These models, going all the way up to a 50% increase in self consumption, showed little difference in the network, likely due to the already large amount of self consumption present in the original network. Another draw back of this method was that it did not take into account the different types of crops and their respective water demands in an urban setting.
Observing this, we decided to take a step back and build a more firm foundation with our data. I have been trying to expand on an interpretation of the base data that creates the virtual water network. I have been analyzing more specifically the commodity flows, crop production by state, and specific water demands of the crops. I have also been refreshing on ecological network analysis in the hopes that a better understanding of the metrics derived from this network analysis may provide greater insight on our set of data.
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