Interactive dashboards

Introduction

The results of the RE4AFAGRI modelling platform runs are hosted in interactive dasbhoards at the RE4AFAGRI website.

The results are available for the five RE4AFAGRI case-study countries, albeit the output availability is different for each country. In addition, WaterCROP outputs are available for the entire SSA region.

Dashboards: user guide

In the dashboards wepbage of the website, it is possible to select the country of interest for which to access the data visualisation dashboards from your web browser. Note that the level of detail and quantity of information provided by the dashboards varies across countries. If you are interested in generating information that is currently unavailable for your area of interest, please reach out to us.

All dashboards summarise information at the first level of national administrative units to ensure a smooth website navigation experience. However, if you are interested in analysing the data at a more local scale within a specific administrative unit, it is sufficient to click above that unit and follow the "Download local data" link in the popup that shows up (see Figure on the side). This action will trigger a file download to your local computer, which can then be browsed with your favourite GIS software, such as QGIS or ArcGIS, For more details on how to open and browse the downloaded file in QGIS, follow this guide.

Dashboards description

For all countries in sub-Saharan Africa, there are two agricultural dashboards available.

• The first dasbhoard covers the current status of agriculture, presenting the distribution of cultivated land and the current yield by crop and irrigation status. The data are derived from the SPAM 2017 v2.1 Sub-Saharan Africa database.

• The second dasbhoard provides WaterCrop model-based estimates of the necessary water input from irrigation (namely, in addition to rainfall) that would need to be provided each month of the year to avoid crop water stress in cropland that currently is rainfed only. These estimates are specific to each crop, and their value depends on the local climate, growing season, and soil characteristics. In addition, the second dashboard reports model-based estimates of the additional yield that this irrigation input could potentially generate. These are produced using established methodologies.

For selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa, there are four additional dashboards available.

• The electricity requirements dashboard displays information on the potential (also called latent) demand to enable energy services in different sectors. These include both agricultural electricity uses (water pumping for irrigation to close the water gap, crop processing and storage), residential household demand to ensure certain appliances can be used (compatibly with the local income level), micro SMEs, as well as healthcare facilities and schools. These information might be useful to understand where are the hotspots of potential electricity demand in areas that are currently lacking access to electricity, both in a specific sector and in terms of total demand.

• The crop processing dashboards illustrate the potential local crop processing throughput in both irrigated and rainfed agricultural land, by crop. The throughput is a function of both the (potential) local total yield, and the market accessibility of the production site. In addition, they also show the total electricity requirements for crop processing and vegetables cold storage. Such figure is year, momth and scenario-specific.

• The electricity access infrastructure planning dashboard visualises results of the OnSSET model, a tool that can support electrification planning and decision making for the achievement of energy access goals in currently unserved locations. The model takes as inputs the electricity requirements visualised in the electricity requirements dasbhoards and based on available infrastructure, resource potentials, and cost parameters, estimates the local cost-optimal technological solution to supply each settlement or community with access to sufficient electricity to meet those needs. It also reports estimates for the corresponding investment requirements.

• Finally, The multi-sectoral policy analysis dashboard presents a set of water-energy-land indicators that respond to the infrastructure and investment needs across different sectors (and their interactions) based on the Scenarios defined in the context of the project.

How are the dashboards developed?

The dashboards are based on a Tableau Public project. To prepare the input data that feeds into the Tableau project, first WaterCROP, M-LED, OnSSET, and NEST output files for different scenarios are merged. The underlying merging scripts are found in the online_dashboards folder of this Github repository. Then, parameters and custom fields for the Tableau Public project (that allow dynamic updating of the dasbhoards based on user choices in dropdown menus) are generated in the field_calculator.R script. Finally, the dashboards are designed and customised via point-and-click in Tableau Public 2023 software.

Can I access the underlying data?

To access detailed (population-cluster level) results for a given administrative unit of interest, please follow these steps: - Enter one of the dashboards, e.g. the the agricultural dashboard for Zambia - Click on the province of interest on one of the maps - A popup will appear with a hyperlink "Download high-resolution data for selected region", leading to a download folder containing data for each province in the selected country

Otherwise, to access all the GIS results data from the four models in a single bulk, please visit our Zenodo data channel and download the outputs.zip folder.