Quantifying and visualizing access to healthy food in a rural area of Australia: A spatial analysis

Quynh Lê (), Hoang Nguyen, Daniel Terry, Stefan Dieters, Stuart Auckland and Gretchen Long

Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, 2015, vol. 7, issue 5, 1017-1029

Abstract: A Geographical Information System (GIS) using ArcGIS tools was adopted to implement three types of spatial analysis: coverage, density and proximity, to evaluate the geographical access to healthy food of the populations in Dorset Municipality, Tasmania, Australia. Data on food outlets, the aggregated socioeconomic disadvantage index, locations, income and population were collected using the Tasmanian Food Outlet Audit and Tasmanian Healthy Food Basket tools. Spatial autocorrelation was conducted where appropriate to examine the relationship between locations and food access. Healthy food outlets were concentrated in the central areas, areas in proximity to the national road and areas of dense population. Their locations also favored the more socio-economically deprived or disadvantaged areas (Moran’s Index=0.924, z-score=5.187, p-value = 0.00 > 0.05). Spatial identification of food deserts in Dorset has been a pioneering attempt to visualize areas with the highest demand for improvement in healthy food access and may be applicable to other areas with similar characteristics. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht and International Society for Plant Pathology 2015

Keywords: Food security; Food access; Food deserts; Healthy food; Proximity; Spatial analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1007/s12571-015-0491-4

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