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Delving into the data behind agriculture, the environment, and a sustainable food chain, Florence Galliers, a Masters student studying Data Science for Global Agriculture, Food and Environment, talks about data science and its importance to the industry.

“I think data science is important because as technology continues to advance, every industry will be collecting and storing more and more data; this means more in depth analysis can take place and aim to make processes more efficient and sustainable,” Florence explained. “In the agriculture industry in particular there are lots of new projects taking off that involve data science, and more specifically machine learning."

Florence commented: “I studied Animal Science for my undergraduate degree and during my final year completed a lab based project. I felt that I still wanted to learn more and so looked into postgraduate options.

“The Data Science course stood out to me because it incorporated data science along with current agriculture and food production issues which are both interesting and important.”

Living locally to the university campus, Florence saw undertaking this postgraduate course as the ideal way to live with her family and support them while continuing to develop her own knowledge.

Florence described her course as ‘challenging but enjoyable’, constantly learning new things. She commented: “Before I started the course I had never done any computer programming but now we have been taught to use the programming language ‘R’.

“The versatility of this within statistics and data science has amazed me and brought me into a world I didn’t know existed before. It has been a fascinating journey so far.

“I also really liked the range of optional modules that we can choose and it has been nice that everyone on my course has done slightly different ones. This has not only allowed me to meet people doing other Masters courses, but also means we all bring slightly different information back together when we have our core modules.”

Talking about her latest project, Florence said: “I recently completed a module in Data Visualisation that I really enjoyed. The project was to create a portfolio of twelve data visualisations using three different datasets. The data covers a wide variety of topics and so it has been really great to explore it and be creative when making my visualisations. In particular the opportunity to use geospatial data within these visualisations has allowed me to strengthen my love for maps!”

Looking to the future, Florence is hoping to continue learning and working on projects that inspire her within the agriculture, environment and animal industries.

To find out more about the Data Science for Global Agriculture, Food and Environment, please click here.