The Dairy Education and Research Centre (DERC) at the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems has developed an exciting data visualization tool which enables researchers to analyze comprehensive data on cattle herds. The tool, named ‘Peek-a-Moo’ can show statistical data on an individual cow’s eating and sleeping patterns and even their interactions with other cows in the herd. A team of seven students from the UBC Master of Data Science (MDS) program collaborated with Dr Borbala Foris, a postdoctoral scholar in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems’ Animal Welfare Program, and Sky Sheng, a graduate student in Applied Animal Biology, to create the Peek-a-Moo dashboard.
The dashboard provides at-a-glance summaries of cow behaviour, which enables researchers to monitor herds without the need for in person or video observations. The tool can be applied to any number of cows, opening the possibility of its use for studying large herds in an industrial scale.
Read the full story at the Faculty of Land and Food Systems website.
Through Strategy 10: Research Culture, UBC is facilitating research that can generate meaningful impacts across local communities.