The Gibbs Land Use and Environment Lab (GLUE) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison aims to make change in the world by conducting scientific research immediately relevant to policymakers, industry, non-governmental organizations and others working on the ground.

Focusing on policy and processes relevant to tropical deforestation, especially driven by ranching and commodity agriculture, GLUE works alongside these policy and action-focused organizations and industry to identify tipping point questions that inform GLUE’s scholarship and ensure they can produce actionable science. They are also committed to communicating their research to general audiences through the media and policy briefs.

AVP has supported GLUE’s efforts in multiple ways. First, AVP worked with GLUE to establish a multi-dimensional data model that would allow them to capture the data points of interest, answer key questions, and yield insights from a variety of currently disparate public data sets. This data model, including custom import, cleaning, and matching logic was then implemented within a data warehouse developed by AVP to support the storage, analysis, and reporting of gathered data.

Once the application was in place, AVP set about conducting a series of data scraping and capture activities focused on publicly available data sets in order to populate the data warehouse and provide GLUE with an unprecedented amount of correlated and structured data in a highly usable form.

AVP then worked with the National Wildlife Federation to develop Visipec, an application utilizing a subset of the data in the data warehouse to enable visualizing the cattle supply chain in Brazil and to enhance traceability and strengthen deforestation monitoring.  Visipec has been written about in the New York Times and the Financial Times.

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