Project leader: Jessica Enright, University of Glasgow, UK
Project duration: 2021-2024
Participating countries: Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Norway and the UK
Funding from NordForsk: 99,4766 EUR
Project website: DigiVet
The DigiVet project studied how livestock data is used across the partner nations, and how technology, training, and regulatory frameworks might provide societal benefit by improving the public-interest uses of these data. The project investigated the risks associated with missing, sparse, or coarsely aggregated data, and evaluate the potential societal benefits of making better quality data more widely available. The study included workshops with stakeholders to map existing practices, and document the gaps, roadblocks, and opportunities for improvement.
Key Findings
DigiVet had a variety of findings across the spectrum of their investigation.
- From interviews and data surveying they have identified key differences in data sources between their partner nations. While significant portions of the key data exist across nations, they have found that the barriers to use are quite different. These in some cases relate to regulatory framework and privacy protection differences, and in some cases to the nature of the data themselves, their format, spatio-temporal granularity, etc. These differences are highlighted in one of DigiVet’s completed outputs: an inventory of agricultural datasets.
- After these initial findings, DigiVet’s later workshops focussed on data and digitalisation in particular use cases, and in trialling technological tools to addres some gaps. A common theme across the three workshops was a combination of differences and similarities across partner nations: while the particular obstacles are different, often the big picture is similar.
- The workshop on food safety revealed that although historical attitudes and traditions with respect to sharing of data relating to foodborne disease differed among countries, future challenges relating to changing legal requirements and shifting attitudes to sharing sensitive data are likely to be similar.
- The workshop on animal movement data highlighted the wider risks and benefits of data digitalisation with the potential to improve outbreak preparedness by enabling data analysis with a disease outbreak. Greater sharing of data, of the right type and for the right purpose across more people and organisations, can have differing societal impacts depending on its use.
- The workshop on antimicrobial usage showed that despite different data collection, management and use infrastructures, the countries were experiencing similar challenges in relation to data digitalisation. Certain challenges could be partly addressed by a well-designed data digitalisation tool, though there was a perception that the needs of different actors should be addressed separately, including restricted access because of the sensitivity of AMU data.'
- Interleaving with their workshop work, DigiVet produced several technical tools for further use and development, including an animal movement analysis tool, an AMU surveillance tool, and a data-protecting deadswitch tool to allow freer sharing of data. All of these have seen development or use beyond DigiVet.
Impact Story
The work within DigiVet was very diverse, with several workshops where the researchers have met stakeholders and done a lot of social science-style work to find out how people use data, what it’s used for, where it’s stored, what the legal and ethical implications of it are. For instance, the DigiVet project ran a workshop hosted by the Swedish National Veterinary Institute. The workshop looked at how antimicrobial usage is recorded in the different nations, how it’s used and how it can be used to understand the relative contribution of different industries and issues concerning privacy and so on.
“Livestock are important for food security in a number of ways in our nations. We need safe food, and we need to deal with things like foodborne pathogens which are factors that trigger morbid processes in the body such as malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, toxins and bacterias. One of our case studies was about pathogens that might cause illness in animals, which could also cause illness in humans. So, basically, we need our food to be safe”, says project leader Jessica Enright.
Key outputs
Shortall, O., Kyle, C., Boden, L., Denwood, M., Enright, J., Bogaardt, C., Cha, W., Nielsen, S., Puk Skarbye, A., Frossling, J., Gustafsson, W., & Hopp, P. (2023). DigiVet Deliverable 3.1: reports from international workshops. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10462232
Hopp, P., Udhwani, T., Helgesen, K. O., Cha, W., Denwood, M., Bogaardt, C., & Enright, J. (2023). DigiVet Deliverable 2.3: Publicly available and reproducible holistic data analysis workflows for the case studies. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10417693
Cha, W., Denwood, M., Bogaardt, C., & Enright, J. (2023). DigiVet Deliverable 2.4: Dashboards to support decision-making by relevant stakeholders within each case study. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10406499
Fernanda Dórea, Ivana Rodriguez Ewerlöf, Matthew Denwood, Wonhee Cha, Stefan Widgren, & Petter Hopp. (2021). Digivet data sources inventory [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7540953
Boden, L., Denwood, M., Enright, J., Rodriguez Ewerlöf, I., Fujiwara, M., Saxmose Nielsen, S., & Shortall, O. (2022). MAPPING DATA ECOSYSTEMS AND ASSOCIATED REGULATORY FRAMEWORKS. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7462364
Boden, L., Enright, J., Bogaardt, C., Denwood, M., Rodriguez Ewerlöf, I., & Shortall, O. (2022). Digivet Stakeholder Workshops: Theoretical Framework (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7440884
All DigiVet’s outputs are available at https://zenodo.org/communities/digivet/