The Where of Coffee

Over the past several years, World GIS Day has become my department's most successful annual event. As the local part of a global network of events highlighting the many uses of Geographic Information Systems, the BSU Geography celebration brings together real-world examples of GIS from our undergraduate and graduate students and from professionals in industry, non-profit organizations and local, state, and federal agencies. 

I have been proud to promote this event, but until this year I have played a very minimal role. This year, I am serving coffee to participants and using it as an opportunity to shed some light on the geography of coffee and to give a couple of examples of how GIS supports coffee growers. 

I brought coffee (see below) to serve to participants and shared a poster to highlight a few applications of GIS in coffee. The main purpose of this blog post is to allow visitors to view thos projects. 

Detail from
The Coffee Economy

One example is an infographic entitled Bean to Billion Dollar Business, which won a communication award at the 2025 ESRI user conference.

See The Coffee Economy on the ESRI Map Gallery for information about the team that produced this graphic, and to explore the details it provides about this important crop and beverage.

Also hosted on an ESRI site is Mapping the impact of global warming on suitable coffee-growing land in Costa Rica by Leslie Spencer, who was an undergraduate biology student at Tufts University when she created it in 2021. This is an excellent example of what GIS is good for -- allowing comparisons among different kinds of spatial information that operate at different scales. This kind of analysis is increasingly important in coffee studies, as farmers and others in the industry respond to very rapidly changing climatic conditions in the context of non-climatic factors. 

This single image draws on many thousands of pieces of information
of different kinds and at different scales.

(For more on Costa Rica and coffee, see my annotated collection of photos at Costa Rica 2020.)

The third example on my poster is a 2020 article in the International Journal of Geo-Information. This is an excellent, peer-reviewed journal that makes its articles fully available online.  Rolando Salas López led a team of researchers who wrote Land Suitability for Coffee (Coffea arabica) Growing in Amazonas, Peru: Integrated Use of AHP, GIS and RS.

Their study identifies the locations of existing farms and identifies appropriate locations for future coffee production. This is very important work for farmers whose are vulnerable to market fluctuations, uneven terms of trade, and multiple threats from climate change. The latter can affect both the timing and amount of precipitation and the prevalence of pests and crop diseases. Because coffee is a tree crop that does not produce until after four years of care and investment, this information is crucial to the economic viability fo farmers.

The coffee I am serving at the event is Pacha Glow from Sunrise Trading, which -- coincidentally -- is from the region of Peru studied by López and his team. I had bought 5 pounds of this coffee for my Spring 2025 Secret Life of Coffee course (an Honors Second-Year Seminar). 

Urusula Ortiz, Coffee Grower

I loved it so much that when I tried to buy it in August and found that it was only available in café-sized bags. This beautiful bag has been in our living room ever since -- though it is only about half-full at this point.

This coffee is from the Peruvian Amazon -- about 1,000 km by road from Cusco and about 3,000 km from my old stomping grounds in Porto Velho. I present this map, zoomed in on the site of the growing area. "Site" is a term geographers use to refer to the characteristics of a place -- in this case, the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve (BIOAY) where the coffee is grown is a site of heavy rainfall, dense forest, and rugged topography. 

A good use of Google Maps is to start here and change scales and basemaps to explore the region in various contexts. The "directions" tool can help to illuminate its "situation" -- a term geographers use to describe relative location -- its distance and direction from other places.

Future Coffee

The story of the Ben Linder Café is very mixed. A BSC graduate helped to create the first fair-trade café in Nicaragua. The story of this café is told in the book Javatrekker by recently retired coffee importer Dean Cycon. This predated Bridgewater travel courses in the country, but students did later visit the café and the landmine-rehabilitation projects it supported. They were so inspired that they developed a proposal for a café in the DMF building. 

Over 1,000 people endorsed the proposal, along with almost every department on campus at the time. The architects of the DMF building even created the framework of a café -- from which good, ethical coffee is occasionally served. The status of the proposal is unresolved. The student who co-led the effort is now a leading organizer in the coffee industry (and the entire food sytsem, actually). We still hope to realize that vision on our campus.