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No one enjoys a mushy tomato. But beyond aesthetics lies a serious problem for some West African nations, where significant portions of the fresh tomato harvest may be lost during transport from farm to market.
Spatial agro-ecologists from the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente in The Netherlands and elsewhere have analyzed the relationship between observed weather conditions in Burkina Faso and Ghana and the microclimate inside truck trailers transporting tomatoes. Their paper Development and validation of a model to estimate postharvest losses during transport of tomatoes in West Africa will be published in the March 2013 volume of the journal Elsevier's Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, and are summarized in an ITC news report about the study.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the roadblocks to transporting fresh produce is . . . roadblocks. Road transport obstacles such as border crossings and police and customs checkpoints are among the main factors (along with physical road conditions) that reduce truck speed, resulting in longer transport times and higher transport temperatures.
Lead author Valentijn Venus reports that the researchers used Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) as one of the main tools to integrate meteorological data with GPS-tracking data from monitored tomato transports. In choosing the IDV, they noted that most GIS tools do not handle time varying, multidimensional datasets well, nor do they provide full support for temporal or spatial animation, which are strengths of the IDV.
