Outside the Coffee Belt: A Study on the Suitability and Sustainability of Coffee Plants in California Due to Climate Change Using GIS

<p>California has a unique climate that is suitable for growing a variety of agricultural crops. As stated by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, California’s agricultural abundance includes more than 400 commodities, and of these, over a third of the vegetables and three-quarters of the fruits and nuts consumed in the United States are grown in California. Mark Gaskell, Ph.D., a California Cooperative Extension Farm Advisor, recently began an experiment to grow coffee plants; he believed that due to changing climatic conditions, California farmers could start to grow coffee plants in their fields. Several farmers also agreed to experiment and found that the plants did indeed increase. The issue, however, is that farmers would like to know if they can reliably plant coffee on their farms and sustain coffee production for years to come. As a result, this study utilized the maximum entropy approach, a well-established algorithm for modeling habitat suitability over geographical domains, to measure the impact of future climate change on the sustainability of growing coffee plants in California in the years ahead. Layers of worldwide climate data that represent 19 bioclimatic variables were utilized in this study. WorldClim is an online repository containing historical, monthly meteorological data averaged across 30 years (1970–2000) and climate data representing possible future conditions based on various climate prediction models. While this study focuses on the impact of climate change on coffee plants, the methodological processes developed and the resultant findings are expected to apply to a wide variety of agricultural crops.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Information Systems and Technology, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Center for Information Systems and Technology

Year dc:date.available

2023

Author dc:creator

• Casillas, Vanessa Arias

Contributors dc:contributor

• June Hilton
• Itamar Shabtai

• Climate Change
• Coffee
• GIS
• Suitability
• Sustainability

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/915

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1937