AReNA’s DHS-GIS Database

Advancing Research on Nutrition and Agriculture (AReNA) is a 6-year, multi-country project in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, being implemented from 2015 through 2020. The objective of AReNA is to close important knowledge gaps on the links between nutrition and agriculture, with a particular focus on conducting policy-relevant research at scale and crowding in more research on this issue by creating data sets and analytical tools that can benefit the broader research community. Much of the research on agriculture and nutrition is hindered by a lack of data, and many of the datasets that do contain both agriculture and nutrition information are often small in size and geographic scope. AReNA team constructed a large multi-level, multi-country dataset combining nutrition and nutrition-relevant information at the individual and household level from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) with a wide variety of geo-referenced data on agricultural production, agroecology, climate, demography, and infrastructure (GIS data). This dataset includes 60 countries, 184 DHS, and 122,473 clusters. Over one thousand geospatial variables are linked with DHS. The entire dataset is organized into 13 individual files: DHS_distance, DHS_livestock, DHS_main, DHS_malaria, DHS NDVI, DHS_nightlight, DHS_pasture and climate (mean), DHS_rainfall, DHS_soil, DHS_SPAM, DHS_suit, DHS_temperature, and DHS_traveltime.营养与农业研究推进计划（Advancing Research on Nutrition and Agriculture，以下简称AReNA）是一项为期6年的多国合作项目，实施区域覆盖南亚与撒哈拉以南非洲，由比尔及梅琳达·盖茨基金会资助，执行周期为2015年至2020年。 该项目的目标是填补营养与农业关联领域的重大知识空白，重点开展规模化的政策导向型研究，并通过构建可惠及广大科研群体的数据集与分析工具，吸引更多该领域的研究投入。 当前多数农业与营养相关研究受制于数据匮乏，而现存兼具农业与营养信息的数据集往往规模偏小、地理覆盖范围有限。 AReNA项目团队构建了一套大型多层级、多国别数据集，将源自人口与健康调查（Demographic and Health Surveys，以下简称DHS）的个体及家庭层面营养与营养相关信息，与涵盖农业生产、农业生态、气候、人口统计、基础设施等多类地理参考数据（GIS数据）进行整合。 该数据集覆盖60个国家、184轮DHS调查以及122473个调查集群，累计有超过1000个地理空间变量与DHS数据完成关联匹配。 整套数据集被划分为13个独立文件，分别为：DHS_distance、DHS_livestock、DHS_main、DHS_malaria、DHS NDVI（归一化差分植被指数，Normalized Difference Vegetation Index，简称NDVI）、DHS_nightlight、DHS_pasture and climate (mean)、DHS_rainfall、DHS_soil、DHS_SPAM、DHS_suit、DHS_temperature以及DHS_traveltime。