Dr. Kelly Garbach (center) speaks with Mark Longstroth (MSU Extension) about results from the 2015 ICP survey of growers’ pollination practices. Photo: Emily May.
Project ICP researcher Kelly Garbach (Point Blue Conservation Science, formerly Loyola University-Chicago), in collaboration with Geoffrey Morgan (Carnegie Mellon University), has developed two publicly-available, open-source programs for anonymizing and cleaning up data from large surveys.
As part of the Integrated Crop Pollination project, Dr. Garbach conducted a multi-state survey of specialty crop growers in collaboration with the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.
“Analyzing the survey data was an exciting challenge,” says Garbach. “We had to keep the data totally anonymous, while keeping enough detail to analyze key network connections.” These connections include information sharing in the agricultural community, including sharing information about pollinator management among growers, extension specialists, beekeepers and others.
Click thumbnail to read the new white paper!
Garbach and Morgan developed two open-source tools to tackle this challenge, called “Anonymizer” and “Linker.” Both are described in more depth in this new white paper.
See the quick start guides Garbach and Morgan developed for Anonymizer and Linker for an overview of what these computational tools can do and step-by-step instructions for using them. Click here to access the free downloadable program files from GitHub.
Read more about results from the Project ICP/USDA-NASS pollination survey in different US crops and regions in these blog posts:
Michigan blueberry survey
California almond survey
Florida blueberry survey