We were delighted to attend the Royal Statistical Society’s International Conference in Edinburgh on 1-4 September 2025 and sponsor the winner of the poster competition, which was won by Tess Vernon and Samuel Connolly, from Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland. This year’s event had over 900 attendees from over 50 countries and featured some fascinating sessions on the latest developments across statistics and data science.
Tess and Samuel won £300 of Amazon vouchers for their poster: ‘Design and Analysis of a Citizen Science Survey of Badger Distribution in Scotland’, and explained what the poster was about: “It was based around our work on the design and analysis for a citizen science survey of Scottish badger distribution. This survey was organised by the charity Scottish Badgers as a follow-up to a previous survey, and we contributed to the project through designing the survey and conducting the statistical analysis.
“The main aim was to produce a current estimate of badger main sett density and distribution in Scotland, as well as assess change since the previous survey. This survey raised awareness for badger conservation in Scotland, including through the training of hundreds of citizen scientist volunteers. The results suggest badger populations in Scotland are continuing to recover from low levels due to historic persecution.”
They added the conference was a great opportunity to learn from talks on a wide range of statistical topics and applications. They also said the poster session was a good chance to network with people from a range of organisations across the country, allowing us to exchange knowledge and experiences.
Plus, they were delighted about winning first prize: “This prize came as a very pleasant surprise. We would like to thank the UK Data Service for kindly sponsoring this poster prize. Communicating our research is very important in statistics, so it means a lot to be recognised for this.
“This badger survey project has come to an end, but there may be another follow-up survey in the future. Winning this prize has showed that events like the RSS conference provide a good platform to raise awareness for a project, thus it could be a good way of finding collaborators for potential future projects. This prize has also inspired us to prioritise scientific communication in other projects going forward.”
Reframing statistics
As for the rest of the conference, one of the highlights was the keynote speech by Professor Claire Miller from the University of Glasgow. Professor Miller’s talk highlighted that many global environmental challenges can be addressed effectively through the development of environmental statistics and data analytics.
An example of this can be found in a partnership between the University of Glasgow and Glasgow City Council to transform Glasgow into a climate resilient city. This will include setting up urban riverscapes, producing social benefits from urban biodiversity, creating more opportunities for active travel and developing clean energy solutions for local communities.
There was also a powerful discussion led by David McCandless on data visualisation as a tool for storytelling. He showed that data often provides a completely different story to what we read about, listen to and watch in the media.
He emphasised that although we are being told many people in the world are getting poorer and that health risks are growing, the data tells us the world is actually becoming safer and richer. This underlines that if we focus on robust statistics centred around a number of key issues relevant to all our lives, we are likely to get a more accurate picture of the world.
The UK Data Service at RSS
Several sessions at this year’s conference featured speakers from the UK Data Service. These included talks by Cristina Magder and Jools Kasmire, who spoke about enabling better access to data. They each explored recent developments around the management and dissemination of data as well as the benefits of using synthetic data.
Cristina also provided a very engaging Fire Talk at the event.