M PPING Identifying food deserts in Lansing, Michigan By Kirk Goldsberry and Sarah Acmoody, Michigan State University A team of researchers and GIS analysts at Michigan State University (MSU) is devising new methods to identify food deserts and visualize the "nutritional terrain" of American cities at precise spatial resolutions. A food desert is defined as an urban area with little or no access to nutritious foods. Residents living in food deserts are more likely to be overweight and have other dietrelated health problems such as diabetes or hypertension. Unfortunately, these areas are both detrimental to public health and becoming more common in urban food landscapes that are increasingly dominated by fast food outlets and less well served by supermarkets and grocery stores. As part of the nationwide Let's Move campaign, America's First Lady, Michelle Obama, has initiated a movement to eradicate America's food deserts in the next seven years. While it is clear that food deserts are an important public health problem, it is less clear how to best identify them. Before food deserts can be eradicated, they must be located. Consequently, there is an emerging need to identify nutritionally at-risk zones and visualize nutritional inequalities within cities. Although many previous investigations of 48 ArcUser Fall 2010 NUTRITIONAL TERRAIN Researchers measured the number of produce items that are accessible by pedestrians given a 10-minute travel time. urban food environments have employed GIS, few studies have taken advantage of the more advanced capabilities of the ArcGIS suite. The MSU research team saw an opportunity to combine the abilities of intensive field data collection and the ArcGIS Network Analyst and ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extensions to accomplish two goals. The first is to quantify realistic intraurban measures of nutritional accessibility. The second is to visualize complex fresh produce accessibility patterns to reveal nutritional inequalities within urban areas. The www.esri.com