Date of Award
2023
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Information Systems and Technology, PhD
Program
Center for Information Systems and Technology
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Claudia Caceres
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
June Hilton
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Itamar Shabtai
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2023 Vanessa Arias Casillas
Keywords
Climate Change, Coffee, GIS, Suitability, Sustainability
Abstract
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.
ISBN
9798382742243
Recommended Citation
Casillas, Vanessa Arias. (2023). Outside the Coffee Belt: A Study on the Suitability and Sustainability of Coffee Plants in California Due to Climate Change Using GIS. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 915. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/915.
