Recently, a new big-data platform was unveiled, offering 75,000 data points offering from about 1,400 studies covering indicators such as yield, soil carbon, and resource efficiency use. Named Evidence for Resilient Agriculture (ERA), the platform delivers data and tools designed to pinpoint what agricultural technologies work where.
Developed by a consortium of international bodies, it is built on the last 30-plus years of agriculture research, providing comprehensive synthesis of the effects of shifting from one technology to another on key indicators of productivity, system resilience and climate change mitigation.
As indicated on the platform’s website, ERA is a meta-dataset and analytical engine built to explore questions on the performance of agricultural technologies. ERA enables users to ask and answer questions about the effects of shifting from one technology to another on indicators of productivity, resilience and climate change mitigation outcomes. It was specifically created to uncover what the data reveal regarding what works where and for whom.
Currently ERA contains about 75,000 observations from about 1,400 agricultural studies that have taken place in Africa. Data have been compiled on more than 250 agricultural products. Management practices, outcomes and products are nested within respective hierarchies, allowing ERA to aggregate and disaggregate information. These data are linked to detailed covariates such as climate, soil and socioeconomics based on geographical coordinates reported in the studies and seasons reported or inferred from remote sensing. The beta version of ERA (currently online) contains information from the core agricultural dataset only; the environmental variables and analysis will be online in early 2020.
The analysis
ERA supports capacities to analyze the database in many ways. The fundamental analysis follows standard meta-analysis procedures. Meta-analysis is a statistical way to combine research results across studies. Meta-analysis was first designed in medicine, then adopted in ecology, and more recently has been used in agricultural studies.
Specifically, ERA calculates response ratios and effect size statistics. The response ratio is calculated as the log ratio of the mean effect of the treatment (i.e., improved practice) against the mean effect of the control practice. These response ratios can then be combined to generate an ‘effect size’ for the relationship, which provides an overall estimate of the magnitude and variability of the relationship.
When calculating effect sizes, results from different studies are weighted to reduce bias from any given study (e.g., one that had hundreds of observations). ERA weights the results of studies based on their level of precision. Because historical agricultural studies rarely report variance at the level necessary, ERA weighs results positively based on the number of replications and negatively based on the number of observations.
ERA uses the meta-analysis and ancillary data to compute additional types of analysis. These include but are not limited to costs, benefits and risks of changing practices; spatial scaling domains for agricultural technologies; the value (positive or negative) of bundling technology; resilience and resistance value of agricultural technologies for variable weather; and more.
Innovations
Meta-analysis is a powerful tool to support decision-making in agriculture. There have been more than 650 meta-analyses conducted in agriculture since 2012. There have been so many meta-analyses that there are now meta-analyses of meta-analyses. Despite the intended purpose of informing decisions, these evaluations rarely provide targeted information for specific uses. This is in part due to the resolution, scope, access and one-off (static) nature of results. ERA changes that situation. Through three innovations, ERA makes data and tools on the performance of agricultural technologies under climate change available on demand.
For more information and access to the ERA platform, users can log on to https://era.ccafs.cgiar.org/
This article was reproduced from literature available on the ERA website.
CALEB OJEWALE
