{"id":11873,"date":"2018-12-14T11:26:09","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T16:26:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=11873"},"modified":"2019-01-10T21:19:28","modified_gmt":"2019-01-11T02:19:28","slug":"bronx-river-trash-collection-and-fecal-bacteria-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/projects\/bronx-river-trash-collection-and-fecal-bacteria-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"Bronx River Trash Collection and Fecal Bacteria Analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"

By: Seth Crider, De Han, Lindsay Menachemi, Nat Quinn, Drew Stanley, and Zack Walker<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h3>\n

In October 2018, Professor Chris Sula from the Pratt School of Information reached out to students in his Information Visualization class with a dataset given to him by Diana Fu, the Education and Stewardship Associate from the Bronx River Alliance (BRA). The BRA is an environmental nonprofit that advocates for maintaining the ecological health of the Bronx River. In 1974, BRA started as <\/span>Bronx River Restoration Project, Inc., formed with Ruth Anderberg as its first director, to help restore and maintain the river. Bronx River Alliance became an organization in 2001. In 2007, a beaver was spotted in the Bronx River <\/span>for the first time in 200 years<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar cited the river as a model for conservation and restoration. <\/span><\/p>\n

The dataset provided was really two datasets: one that showed how much trash was picked up out of the river by BRA volunteers \u2013 including what side of the river and what type of trash it was \u2013 and another that showed the prevalence of fecal bacteria (Enterococcus) that has ended up in the river, including the geospatial locations of where this bacteria has been measured in the river. <\/span><\/p>\n

After speaking with Fu, this group of students found that six main research questions emerged, three per dataset. For the trash-specific dataset, the following questions were uncovered:<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Which booms collect which type of trash? How much of it is coming from Westchester County?<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. What trends over time do we see within the trash data? (e.g. are there certain seasons where trash increases or decreases? are there certain events that correlate to these changes?)<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. Which side(s) of the river have the most trash collection?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For the fecal and contamination dataset:<\/span><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Where are river segment sources of illegal discharge?<\/span><\/li>\n
    2. How does this data correlate to rainfall over time?<\/span><\/li>\n
    3. Where are the main sewage treatment plant locations and how do those locations correlate to contamination?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Six students in this Information Visualization class volunteered to tackle these six questions, with the ultimate goal of creating a physical large-scale poster for the Bronx River Alliance to display in their new space. BRA\u2019s goals were to better understand core trends and meaning in their data, and to provide a display that highlights the impactful and important work of their current volunteers.<\/span><\/p>\n

      Materials<\/strong><\/h3>\n

      Data:<\/b><\/p>\n