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Systematic land use planning to address environmental impacts does not typically include human health and wellbeing as explicit inputs. We tested the effects of including issues related to human health, ecosystem services, and community wellbeing on the outputs of a standard land use planning process which is primarily focused on environmental variables. We consulted regional stakeholders to identify the health issues that have environmental links in the Sacramento, California region and to identify potential indicators and datasets that can be used to assess and track these issues. Marxan planning software was used to identify efficient land use patterns to maximize both ecological conservation and human health outcomes. Outputs from five planning scenarios were compared and contrasted, resulting in a spatially explicit series of tradeoffs across the scenarios. Total area required to meet imputed goals ranged from 10.4% to 13.4% of the total region, showing somewhat less efficiency in meeting biodiversity goals when health outcomes are included. Additionally, we found 4.8% of residential areas had high greening needs, but this varied significantly across the six counties. The work provides an example of how integrative assessment can help inform management decisions or stakeholder negotiations potentially leading to better management of the production landscapes in food systems. 

Public interest in where food comes from and how it is produced, processed, and distributed has increased over the last few decades, with even greater focus emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mounting evidence and experience point to disturbing weaknesses in our food systems’ abilities to support human livelihoods and wellbeing, and alarming long-term trends regarding both the environmental footprint of food systems and mounting vulnerabilities to shocks and stressors. How can we tackle the “wicked problems” embedded in a food system? More specifically, how can convergent research programs be designed and resulting knowledge implemented to increase inclusion, sustainability, and resilience within these complex systems, support widespread contributions to and acceptance of solutions to these challenges, and provide concrete benchmarks to measure progress and understand tradeoffs among strategies along multiple dimensions? This article introduces and defines food systems informatics (FSI) as a tool to enhance equity, sustainability, and resilience of food systems through collaborative, user-driven interaction, negotiation, experimentation, and innovation within food systems. Specific benefits we foresee in further development of FSI platforms include the creation of capacity-enabling verifiable claims of sustainability, food safety, and human health benefits relevant to particular locations and products; the creation of better incentives for the adoption of more sustainable land use practices and for the creation of more diverse agro-ecosystems; the wide-spread use of improved and verifiable metrics of sustainability, resilience, and health benefits; and improved human health through better diets. 

Current studies on data sharing via data commons or shared vocabularies using ontologies mainly focus on developing the infrastructure for data sharing yet little attention has been paid to the role of power in data sharing among food system stakeholders. Stakeholders within food systems have different interpretations of the types and magnitudes of their own and other’s level of power to solve food system challenges. Politically neutral, yet scientifically/socioeconomically accurate power classification systems are yet to be developed, and must be capable of enumerating and characterizing what power means to each stakeholder, existing power dynamics within the food system, as well as alternative forms of power not currently utilized to their full capacity. This study describes the design and implementation of a workshop, which used methods from community-based participatory modeling, to examine the role of power relative to data sharing and equitable health outcomes. Workshop participants co-created several boundary objects that described the power relationships among food system stakeholders and the changes needed to current power relationships. Our results highlight current imbalances in power relationships among food system stakeholders. The information we collected on specific relationships among broad categories of stakeholders highlighted needs for initiatives and activities to increase the types and varieties of power especially across consumers, farmers, and labor stakeholder groups. Furthermore, by utilizing this workshop methodology, food system stakeholders may be able to envision new power relationships and bring about a fundamental re-orienting of current power relationships capable of valorizing food system sustainability/resiliency, especially the health of its workers and consumers. 

Informed policy and decision-making for food systems, nutritional security, and global health would benefit from standardization and comparison of food composition data, spanning production to consumption. To address this challenge, we present a formal controlled vocabulary of terms, definitions, and relationships within the Compositional Dietary Nutrition Ontology (CDNO, www.cdno.info ) that enables description of nutritional attributes for material entities contributing to the human diet. We demonstrate how ongoing community development of CDNO classes can harmonize trans-disciplinary approaches for describing nutritional components from food production to diet.