SDG Detail

F&ES 611 Introduction to Environmental Data Science

Postgraduate course

Project description

This course provides an introduction to the rapidly growing and promising area of data science in environmental and social-environmental research that is accompanying the explosion of data in our digital age. The course helps students develop highly marketable tech skills and incubate and launch new interdisciplinary collaborative projects at Yale that integrate data science techniques to solve important problems. Nearly every aspect of life is now connected (e.g., mobile phones, smart devices, social media) and/or digitized (e.g., book archives, government records, websites, communication), and observation of the natural environment increasingly occurs in digital form. In this course, students are introduced to various techniques and software for wrangling, cleaning, managing, and analyzing data and text at various scales, with an emphasis on integrating these methods into analysis and research. The course has an innovative format that leverages distributed knowledge around Yale. Students meet as a whole class a few times during the term to cover overarching topics. Meanwhile, students also work with the instructors to: (1) design a coherent path of study using the resources of StatLab, YCRC, and other workshops around campus, and (2) create a data project that will be presented to the class at the end of the term.