OVERVIEW: FEWSION (https://fewsion.us) was founded in 2016 by a grant from the INFEWS program that is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The purpose of the project is to bring together a multi-university team of scientists to map the U.S. food energy and water system at the mesoscale of cities and counties, and to use that data to study the sustainability and resilience of that system.

INTELLECTUAL MERIT: FEWSION has built the first complete empirical description of the U.S. supply chains so that every citizen and policymaker in the U.S. can see where their commodities come from. The FEWSION 1.0/2.0 database is the first complete dataset describing that system, and has been used as a basis for dozens of scholarly publications explaining the behavior of that system. Some key publications include a paper in Nature in 2021 demonstrating the first all-hazards food supply chain risk model for US cities, and a paper in Nature Sustainability in 2020 that argues for alfalfa fallowing programs as the solution to the western water crisis by way of removing irrigation water from the western beef supply chain. The team's work will be sustained beyond the end of this initial investment through the establishement of a research center at Northern Arizona University and continued funding from DoD, IARPA, USDA, and follow-on NSF grants.

Gomez, M., Mejia, A., Ruddell, B.L. & Rushforth, R.R. (2021). "Supply chain diversity buffers cities against food shocks." Nature, V.595. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03621-0

Richter, B.D., Bartak, D., Caldwell, P. et al. (2020). ?Water scarcity and fish imperilment driven by beef production.? Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0483-z.

BROADER IMPACTS: FEWSION provides U.S. communities with real-life data to map the vulnerabilities and environmental footprints of supply chains as well as their resilience. FEW-View is the online educational tool that helps U.S. residents and community leaders visualize their supply chains, with an emphasis on food, energy, and water. FEW-View? was released to the public on April 29, 2019. Using FEW-View, the team's researchers have provided the U.S. public with data-driven insights to help manage the COVID-19 supply chain crisis, to help FEMA with national emergency preparedness exercises, and to recommend solutions for the Western Water Crisis. The science behind FEWSION has led to the creation of the FEWSION for Community Resilience Network (F4R, https://fewsion.us/f4r/), a summer workshop on supply chain data science, a not-for-credit course offered by NAU Continuing Education, and a graduate course INF523 offered by Northern Arizona University and other universities. Dozens of junior scientists have been trained on the ideas of networked system resilience by the project. A podcast series on supply chains was released on SoundCloud under the name "Crucial FEWSION". Two of the first textbooks on the food energy water nexus have been published by the research team. The team's research and educational message has been featured dozens of times in the press, and held the front page banner of the NSF's homepage in 2019 after the release of FEW-View.

Ruddell, B.L., Miller, J., Rushforth, R.R., Salla, R., Soktoeva, E. &  Gorantla, R. (2021). "FEW-View? 1.3, the FEWSION? Visualization System," 04 October, 2021. https://fewsion.us / https://fewsion.dtn.asu.edu.

Saundry, P. and Ruddell, B.L. (eds.). (2020). ?The Food-Energy-Water Nexus,? (AESS Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and Sciences Series). Springer, 978-3-030-29913-2. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29914-9

Ruddell, B.L., Rushforth, R.R. & Ryan, S.M. (2021). F4R?: FEWSION for Community Resilience? Curriculum. July 16th, 2021 Edition, Lulu Press.

Last Modified: 12/13/2022
Modified by: Benjamin L Ruddell