Ally McAlpine

Written 14 posts

Alastair is the Chief Statistician in the Scottish Government. He is responsible for the professional standards of official statistics produced in Scotland, their trustworthiness, value and quality. He is also co-Director at ADR Scotland which is a partnership combining specialists in the Scottish Government’s Data for Research Unit with the expertise of academic researchers at the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research.

Making Better Use of Data for Land-Use and the Environment

13th September 2021

In this blog I will talk about work we are doing to make better use of data and evidence for land-use and the environment. I am also calling out to environmental and land-use analysts to get involved. Previously I wrote about improving the use of data that we hold with projects like data linkage. This…

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Farming Families Wellbeing in the 21st Century

14th July 2021

From farm data to families wellbeing Last month I wrote about our new Scottish Crop Map data. But we are also getting the most from the data we already have. One such project aims to link anonymised farm data to other national surveys and data sets like Scotland’s Census. This will help us look at…

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Agricultural Statistics, Data Science and a Crop Map

21st May 2021

As an analyst with a passion for maps and data science, I am excited about our new data science crop map of agricultural land-use. It helps to improve the accuracy of our statistics which I mentioned in my last blog post. But first let me highlight some other releases, as it has been a busy…

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Could this be the last December Agricultural Survey?

23rd March 2021

Welcome to the first blog on Agricultural Statistics. Through this regular note we will update farmers, agents and other people interested in agricultural food production and associated supply chains on gathering statistics through surveys and other methods. The statistical teams in the Rural and Environmental Sciences and Analytical Services (RESAS) Division support many policy areas…

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