Prof. Murray Lark delivered statistics research methods module for University of Zimbabwe students

I recently read a remarkable book called Victorians and Numbers (Goldman, 2022). This tells the story of how a diverse set of academics, campaigners and politicians in Victorian Britain were enthused by the idea of collecting, analysing and visualising data to identify social problems and injustices and to support policies to address them.  Parallel movements in …

Completing a PhD: Dr Chris Chagumaira reflects

Dr Christopher Chagumaira successfully defended his PhD thesis in September 2022. He was part of the first cohort of PhDs with the UoN-Rothamsted Graduate Centre for International Agriculture. His thesis focused on understanding and communicating uncertainty in spatial predictions of soil micronutrients for various stakeholders (including policymakers, farmers, and managers). He is now a Research …

How should uncertainty in spatial information be communicated?

This post is written by Dr Christopher Chagumaira with contributions from Prof Murray Lark.  Many and varied people have to make decisions about environmental management, be they farmers, policy-makers or managers, and spatial information about environmental variables (e.g., soil properties) is essential for this task. Within the Future Food Beacon, the GeoNutrition project is concerned …

Statistics in the GeoNutrition project – by Murray Lark, Christopher Chagumaira and Alice Milne

The intriguing message from our recent Nature paper (Gashu et al., 2021) is that the concentration of essential dietary micronutrients (like zinc and selenium) in locally-grown staple crops depends on where you look in the landscape. This was found in two African countries with contrasting cropping and food systems, but a shared common challenge of …

Predicting micronutrients in the soil: an interview with Christopher Chagumaira

Christopher Chagumaira is a UoN-RRes PhD studentship recipient. His project is titled: Geospatial modelling of soil geochemistry at national scale for improved human nutrition and he is supervised by Prof Murray Lark (UoN), Prof Martin Broadley (UoN), Dr Alice Milne (RRes), Prof Patson Nalivata (LUANAR)and Dr Joseph Chimungu (LUANAR). Why did you decide to do …

Meet the Beacon: Prof Murray Lark

Murray Lark is Professor of Environmetrics and a member of the Future Food Beacon. Prof Lark is interested in spatial statistical models and their application to problems in sampling and experimental design and the analysis of data from large surveys.   Much of his work is concerned with understanding constraints on crop performance with respect to …