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Far-right expatriates

I’ve always been curious about how many French expats voted for Le Pen. So a while back, I mapped the vote share published by embassies during the last round of the 2017 election. Almost 60,000 made the mental gymnastics to vote for xenophobia while living in another country.

I decided to limit the count to embassies which had received more than 200 votes. Smaller vote shares really threw of the scale- For instance, only 14 people voted at the embassy in Syria, but Le Pen got 64% of them.

You might notice a pretty high overlap with countries hosting lots of french military personnel (Djibouti, Gabon, Lebanon). The only country here where Le Pen got more than 40% was Djibouti where she managed to get 610 of the 1530 votes cast.

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Cultivation in grazing reserves

Using a 3-period timescan model (developed by Boudinaud, 2019), I mapped cropland expansion within the pastoral reserve of Sideradougou. The blue pixels represent active cropland during the 2020 growing season.

Grazing reserves in Burkina Faso are being devoured by agriculture. While these areas are typically protected by state decree and reserved for herds, the need for increased cultivation places enormous pressure on these zones. The dominant narrative of “farmer-herder” conflict in the Sahel often places the blame on mobile herders for encroaching on sedentary farmers’ fields. But it’s far more complex than that as we also see farmers moving into grazing lands.

By creating an NDVI time series during the growing season, this method isolates cropland by identifying pixels corresponding to a spectral signature common to Sahelian agriculture. This was performed using Google Earth Engine.

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STAMP: A call center for pastoralists

One of my current projects is the “Sustainable Technology Adaptation for Malian Pastoralists” initiative. It consists of a call center based in Bamako, Mali that fields calls from pastoralists in Gao, Tombouctou and Mopti who seek information on pasture, water and market prices. The call center is powered by an open platform that uses field data and satellite imagery to gather this data. You can actually use the platform yourself.

As a consultant, I work mostly on the interface, building the GIS products that go into it. I also work directly with pastoralists and other project staff to test the products, facilitate the collection of field data and provide GIS trainings as needed.

Screenshot of the STAMP interface

More information on the product can be found here.

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Qanon Congressional Candidates: 2020

This is easily one of the most bizzare maps i’ve made- each US congressional district boasting a candidate who has publicly declared to believe in the Qanon conspiracy theory as of July 2020.

The data was sourced from Alex Kaplan’s exhaustive list of Qanon-affiliated congressional candidates. Districts shaded in a solid colour have a Qanon candidate running in a primary whereas those shaded with a line fill have a candidate who has made it to the general

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Desertification in the Sahel

Github for dataset

These rasters show recurrent biomass deficits in West Africa between 2015 and 2019. The idea is to show areas at risk of desertification by focusing on recent years of continued degradation. Desertification as a concept has a number of different definitions, many of which are divergent. As a result, this dataset and map may not fit within a specific user’s definition of choice. The goal of this map is not to offer a new definition of desertification or to provide a new lens with which to view it. Rather, the idea is to highlight areas where biomass production is suffering from multi-year degradation.

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