Internship: building a multi-source data framework for modeling adaptation/mitigation interactions in dairy cattle systems

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INRAE presentation

The French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) is a major player in research and innovation. It is a community of 12,000 people with 272 research, experimental research, and support units located in 18 regional centres throughout France. Internationally, INRAE is among the top research organisations in the agricultural and food sciences, plant and animal sciences, as well as in ecology and environmental science. It is the world’s leading research organisation specialising in agriculture, food and the environment. INRAE’s goal is to be a key player in the transitions necessary to address major global challenges. Faced with a growing world population, climate change, resource scarcity, and declining biodiversity, the Institute has a major role to play in building solutions and supporting the necessary acceleration of agricultural, food and environmental transitions.

Work environment, missions and activities

You will work in the Herbivores joint research Unit (UMRH). The mission of this Unit is to produce, integrate and disseminate knowledge, and share expertise to design multi-performing herbivore farming systems that meet the challenges of global change (environmental, socio-economic and digital transition). The Unit has 118 permanent staff and welcomes 70 non-permanent staff each year. It is organized into 4 research teams, a management team and a support team.

You will work within the Livestock Systems, Agroecological Transition, Resilience and Product Quality team (STARQ), in close interaction with colleagues from the Digestion, Nutrition, Feed, Metabolism, Microbes team (DINAMIC). You will also interact with researchers and engineers from the PEGASE unit as well as the Herbipôle experimental Unit.

The project in which you will be involved, entitled OPTI-HERD (“Which livestock management practices enable cattle herds to become more resilient and efficient while limiting greenhouse gas and nitrogen emissions in the face of environmental disturbances? A modeling approach.”), is funded by the CLIMAE Meta-Programme (2025–2026). The result of a collaboration between specialists in genetics, animal science, economics, soil science, and environmental science, OPTI-HERD aims to produce knowledge and operational tools to support stakeholders in the sector toward more sustainable livestock systems better adapted to present and future challenges.

Ruminant livestock systems are both victims of and contributors to climate change. In a context marked by increasing frequency and intensity of climate hazards, these systems must develop strategies both to adapt to their effects and to mitigate their impacts. Until now, most proposed adaptation and mitigation solutions have been considered either at the individual level (for example: feeding, genetics) or at the system level (for example: grazing management or use of purchased supplementary feed). However, a solution validated at one scale may conflict with another scale, generating trade-offs that may offset the efforts made, or even worsen the problem (Van Middelaar et al., 2013). It is therefore essential, before proposing climate change adaptation and mitigation solutions, to develop an integrated, multi-scale database enabling the identification of drivers, synergies, and trade-offs across the different levels of organization.

Your mission will consist of: 

1. from a scientific perspective, identifying potential links between adaptation and mitigation proxies in dairy cows facing climate hazards; 
2. from an operational perspective, carrying out harmonization work on individual dairy cow data from several INRAE experimental sites, originating both from experiments and from routine animal monitoring within these facilities. These data are highly heterogeneous in terms of time step (from daily records to a cow’s entire career), variables considered (genetics, physiological markers, performance, feed, and environmental footprint), and levels of integration (individual–herd). Your main objective will be to make these data interoperable, structured, and usable for the needs of the project.

More specifically, you will be responsible for:

1. gathering, cleaning, and structuring data from varied sources and formats (tabular files, databases, time series, R objects, metadata, etc.) into a single coherent set (relational databases and/or multidimensional hypercubes);
2. computing and documenting new variables from raw data in order to make the different datasets comparable and consistent;
3. conducting an exploratory analysis of the full dataset in order to identify cow adaptation and mitigation proxies and their potential associations through:
   • overall descriptive characterization (means or medians, standard deviations, sample sizes, diversity of breeds, feed types, and systems considered);
   • identification of possible data entry errors and outliers;
   • characterization of variable distributions (normal, Poisson, Weibull, or other);
   • conducting a range of univariate and multivariate analyses, both parametric and/or non-parametric, to quantify the targeted interactions, such as correlations, PCA, analysis of variance, among others.

 

Bibiliography: Van Middelaar, C.E., Berentsen, P.B.M., Dijkstra, J., De Boer, I.J.M., 2013. Evaluation of a feeding strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from dairy farming: The level of analysis matters. Agricultural Systems 121, 9–22. doi:10.1016/j.agsy.2013.05.009

Special conditions of activity: Integration into a multidisciplinary environment. Work mainly screen-based, with the possibility of visiting experimental beef and dairy cattle facilities.

Training and skills

Recommended training: Master’s year 1 or 2, or engineering school in data science, statistics, agronomy, or animal/livestock sciences

Required knowledge: Data analysis, R software, SQL queries

Appreciated experience: Livestock systems, environment, and cattle production

Skills: Teamwork, autonomy, rigor, and organizational skills

INRAE's life quality

By joining our teams, you benefit from (depending on the type of contract and its duration):

- 2.5 days of leave per month worked;
- parenting support: CESU childcare, leisure services;
- skills development systems: training, career advise;
- social support: advice and listening, social assistance and loans;
- holiday and leisure services: holiday vouchers, accommodation at preferential rates;
- sports and cultural activities;
- collective catering.

The Theix site in Saint-Genès-Champanelle is served by the T2C line number P39 and an on-demand transport service. It also has parking facilities and services dedicated to cycling.

How to apply

I send my CV and my motivation letter