Integrating Weather and Land Cover Data into Geospatial Impact Evaluations

Abstract

Integrating gridded weather and earth observation data into impact evaluations holds great promise. It allows researchers to capture environmental context, external shocks, and even to measure outcomes (e.g., land cover change, agricultural production) that surveys might miss due to spatial or temporal data collection constraints. However, with great power comes great responsibility: the increasing ease of extracting time series from these datasets belies potentially complex geospatial and measurement issues that can affect the magnitude, direction, as well as interpretation of impact evaluation estimates. This chapter highlights several of the most common issues while providing resources to help guide researchers to thoughtfully use (and avoid misuse) of weather, vegetation, land cover, and extreme event data in the context of geospatial impact evaluation.