How Regrid Land Parcel Data Helped this Researcher Assess Hurricane Damage to Coffee Farms in Puerto Rico

One of the benefits of working with land parcel data from Regrid is the ability to take other forms of geospatial data and identify which parcels they affect or interact with. Oftentimes, geospatial data comes as points of interest (POI) which show where something happened, or where a data point is located, but not what property the data is associated with, nor that property’s underlying ownership, assessment, and use information.

If you need to know more than simply “where,” you need Regrid. 

For researchers, academics, and non-profits, Regrid’s Data With Purpose program can get you the parcel boundaries and data you need, on a pay-what-you-can basis. What’s more, unlike other parcel providers, we’ll get back to you quickly, and get you what you need as fast as we can.

Apply for Data With Purpose.

A Guest post by Data With Purpose participant, Francis Russell. Francis is a second year Master's student and an incoming Doctoral student working with Dr. Carlos Ramos in the Department of Geography at the University of Texas - Austin.

Regrid’s data was integral to my spatial analysis of damage to coffee plots in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María. I used LiDAR data to derive Digital Surface Models from before and after the hurricane to assess the loss of vegetation on coffee farms due to María. I had point data from the USDA that showed locations of coffee farms on the island, but I was lacking their property boundaries to be able to define the extent of my analysis. This brought me to Regrid, which was one of the only sites I came across that had property boundaries for Puerto Rico. 

I reached out about their Data With Purpose program to see if I could qualify to receive the data that I needed free of charge, and they were happy to help. 

The property boundaries from Regrid allowed me to analyze the vegetation loss on roughly 450 farms in 15 different municipalities. Additionally, a few locations of coffee farms were added to the database thanks to the information in the attributes of the parcel shapefiles. The results of the damage assessment were then aggregated to the municipality level in order to compare the amounts of vegetation loss between municipalities. These results will contribute to the growing field of disaster studies and literature regarding the spatial variability of damage to agricultural plots after hurricanes in Puerto Rico.

Researching coffee haciendas in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria