On March 30, USDA is hosting Ag Data Viz Day, a day-long event focused on learning about data visualization in USDA and inspiring future data analytics projects. March is also Women’s History Month, so it is especially exciting that Deputy Secretary Jewel Bronaugh, who has made history as the first Black woman to serve as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, is delivering the keynote address on March 30. You can see the full agenda and register here: Ag Data Viz Day 2022.

Data visualization is a powerful way to efficiently spot patterns, trends and outliers in data. As the volume and complexity of data have exploded in recent decades, decisionmakers have increasingly relied on visualizations to make sense of data. But data visualization is not new. By some accounts, people started making maps—arguably the earliest form of data visualization—8,000 years ago. For a long time, it was rare to visualize anything other than geography. Gradually, astronomers, mathematicians and other scientists began using charts, tables and, eventually, graphs. In the 19th century, data visualization increasingly informed public policy in subjects such as population, economics, weather and health—the roots of the dashboards government staff use today!

A famous early example, apropos of Women’s History Month, was created by Florence Nightingale, a British nurse and statistician. Nightingale was appalled by the poor conditions in hospitals and barracks during the Crimean War in the 1850s. She analyzed soldier mortality data and produced this groundbreaking visualization:

If interested, you can read more at this link. The gist is that each triangle represents one month from 1854-1856: blue represents deaths from disease, red from war wounds and black from other causes. Nightingale successfully (and surprisingly) demonstrated that far more soldiers died from disease than war wounds. As a result, policies changed, and deaths decreased.

As the Assistant Chief Data Officer for the Natural Resources and Environment Mission Area, my vision is for Forest Service data to be discoverable, accessible, useable, valuable and secure for all who need it, enabling analysts to create visualizations as impactful as Nightingale’s. Data governance is the foundation: ensuring appropriate rules are set and followed. That foundation can give rise to thrilling insights, and dashboards and other data visualizations are key tools in that process.

To learn more, consider attending Ag Data Viz Day. You will hear from agency leadership and see some of the exciting data visualization projects taking place in USDA today, including presentations from the Forest Service’s Office of Sustainability and Climate and the Office of Grants and Agreements. Hope to see you there!