Tools

Research Database

The Research Database project was initiated to address the gap in identifying research completed or underway pertinent to intentional or catastrophic events in the food and agriculture sector. The work accomplished in this project assists public and private sector leaders in addressing research gaps, needs, and to conduct vulnerability assessments. The National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD) established a database to ensure that research in the food and agriculture sector was captured and available for viewing. NCFPD has identified and assessed existing research from numerous U.S. and international databases. Those projects deemed of value have been added to the data base totaling over 300 entries to date while more than 1000 have been reviewed. The project entries contain projects addressing the intentional contamination of the food protection, animal, and water supply. This includes methods of contamination, detection, persistence, risk assessment/communication, and decontamination. The final aims of the project are to create a Food Defense Research Agenda. This will be accomplished by matching research requirements and needs from government and the private sector with gaps identified through this project.

For access to the Research Database, please register at https://www.foodshield.org/member/register/index.cfm

FIDES (Focused Integration of Data for Early Signals)

The National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD) has initiated research and development of technology solutions that supports data fusion, analytics, and dissemination within and across organizations to identify and warn of food threats, provide risk management assessments, and provide decision makers data to make informed assessments and decisions.

Current work on this project has established the foundation to build a platform that allows for focused integration of data that provides a comprehensive, systematic process for monitoring potential food threats and identifying adverse food events. The current effort is assessing non-traditional data sources to determine their contribution to identifying and alerting risks in the food system, building retrospective case studies of known food system perturbances and foodborne illness outbreaks, building thresholds for data sources to alert on anomalies, and is testing fusion of sources to proactively identify future threats. 

CRISTAL (CRIticality SpaTial AnaLysis)

Food and agriculture comprise a systems-based infrastructure that contains a complex network of farms, individual production or processing facilities, and distribution, which the United States relies on economically, and the world relies upon as a reliable source of food. These complex food systems derive their efficiency and vulnerability from the way each supply chain system is constructed. Methods that document and assess the components that comprise this critical food infrastructure are needed to prevent naturally occurring and anthropogenic disasters from crippling the food system.

CRISTAL enables private food companies and the government to compare disparate food systems for the allocation of scarce security and risk mitigation resources. CRISTAL utilizes user-friendly software for a wide variety of food systems and users. CRISTAL engages private food companies to improve understanding of their risks, and ultimately increases the safety and security of global food systems. Furthermore, CRISTAL greatly aids food system personnel in mitigating catastrophic supply-chain failures, and reduces the duration of widespread food-borne illnesses. CRISTAL significantly improves the safety and reliability of the global food system by enabling users to share and analyze complex food system structures, and by efficiently identifying critical food facilities.

For more information on this project, contact Andrew Huff, NCFPD Research Fellow at huff@umn.edu.