Harvesting Geospatial Opportunity

Exploring Parcel Suitability for Community Garden Development in Maui County, Hawaii

Master’s Capstone Project by Chloe Hoke, M.A.

Capstone Project Submitted in the Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Applied Geospatial Information Systems and Technology
at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Geography

Awarded Outstanding Capstone Project of 2022
by the UCLA MAGIST Academic Advisory Board

Exploring Parcel Suitability for Community Garden Development in Maui County, Hawaii

This project demonstrates how stakeholder input and community insights can be used with spatial data to create a dynamic inventory of potential land for community garden development in Maui County, Hawaiʻi. Utilizing diverse data sources, including environmental, geophysical, political, and socioeconomic data, the tool provides an interactive interface for customized site suitability assessment. The goal is to empower community members with data-driven decision-making, expand community engagement, and lay the foundation for a scalable geospatial tool.

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Phase 1:

Defining the Challenge & Opportunity

With urgent compounding challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, extractive tourism, and heavy reliance on food and supply imports, Maui County faces extreme food insecurity in a post-colonial world.

Community gardens can be key components of sustainable urban food systems that can address local food insecurity, increase urban green space, and support community well-being.

Phase 2:

Understanding Community Needs & Existing Efforts

Many local nonprofits and volunteer-based organizations have worked to establish school and community gardens in Maui County, but decisions on where to expand are often entirely opportunistic, as it can be challenging to efficiently find potential locations that effectively balance stakeholder priorities and site suitability.

Phase 3:

Building the Geospatial Database

Selected collaboratively with community partners, the layers include a variety of relevant environmental, political, and local community-based datasets. Data was gathered from a variety of entities including the State of Hawaiʻi GIS Program, the Trust for Public Land, the CDC, NOAA, and local community organizations such as Grow Some Good.

All spatial data was QAQC’ed, fully documented, contained in a single PostgreSQL database, and connected to a hosted Geoserver instance for custom styling.

Phase 4:

Developing the Code

The tool was custom-built in a Jupyter Notebook that leveraged Anaconda for Python. Python, HTML, CSS, and Anaconda. The tool references the unique data layers hosted in Geoserver and leverages custom Python, HTML, CSS, and specifically the ipywidgets library to create an intuitive, data-driven user-interface complete with interactive layer selection, parameter input, and query selection.

Phase 5:

Exploring Results in Context

Exploration of results revealed that a strictly rule-based quantitative approach to site selection can often overlook or underdeliver in terms of actual community impact and expected project value.

Results highlighted the necessary inclusion of more local knowledge and community insights which in collaboration with the geospatial decision-making tools, can expand output value even further to empower existing efforts to manage increasingly complex environmental land use decisions.

In this way, this project exemplifies how the geospatial can inform and empower stakeholders and non-experts, optimize decision-making efficiency, accelerate direct community action, and more effectively move towards a sustainable food future for Maui County and beyond.