ISSS608 2017-18 T3 Assign Priyadarsan Shankar

VAST Challenge 2018: Suspense at the Wildlife Preserve
Mini Challenge 2 - Like a duck to water

Background

Methodology

Findings

Conclusion

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Follow the pipit to view the interactive story on Tableau:

The challenge

The VAST Mini Challenge 2 2018 is a direct sequel to the VAST Mini Challenge 2 2017 which investigated the endangering of the Rose crested blue pipit bird species by environmental pollution.

Last year, the Kasios Furniture Company was implicated in environmental damage to the Boonsong Lekagul Wildlife Preserve for both dumping toxic waste and polluting the air with chemicals from its manufacturing process. But Kasios is not taking these accusations lying down, and they deny any accusation of industrial waste dumping! Kasios’ spokespersons state that there isn’t any ground contamination near the remote ranger station that was suggested by last year’s mini-challenge 1 and 3 participants, and they have inspected that area and found it as pristine as the rest of the preserve.

Outraged ornithology professors from Mistford College journeyed out to look over the dumping site themselves and perform soil analyses. They returned to report that the site looked like there had been recent excavation and building activities going on. Boonsong Preserve rangers later confirmed that a new ranger station was being built at that site! Soil samples taken from the site were inconclusive in detecting Methylosmolene (the toxic manufacturing chemical in the suspected dumping) or any other contaminant, as new top soil had been trucked in.

With a primary piece of evidence against Kasios now gone, investigators will need to take another approach. Professors in the Mistford College Hydrology Department have come forward with several years of water sensor readings from rivers and streams in the preserve. These samples were taken from different locations scattered throughout the area and contain measurements of several chemicals of possible interest, but they have never been analyzed due to lack of funding. Could visual analytics help reveal something in this data that could make up for the soil evidence that was destroyed?

Your task is to investigate the hydrology data from across the Preserve. You are given a map of the Preserve (with the same base as last year’s challenge), with named sampling sites indicated on the map (the names have local significance, but are just mnemonics for your study) You are also provided with readings from each sampling station over time for several different chemicals and water properties.

Questions:

1. Characterize the past and most recent situation with respect to chemical contamination in the Boonsong Lekagul waterways. Do you see any trends of possible interest in this investigation? Your submission for this questions should contain no more than 10 images and 1000 words.

2. What anomalies do you find in the waterway samples dataset? How do these affect your analysis of potential problems to the environment? Is the Hydrology Department collecting sufficient data to understand the comprehensive situation across the Preserve? What changes would you propose to make in the sampling approach to best understand the situation? Your submission for this question should contain no more than 6 images and 500 words.

3. After reviewing the data, do any of your findings cause particular concern for the Pipit or other wildlife? Would you suggest any changes in the sampling strategy to better understand the waterways situation in the Preserve? Your submission for this question should contain no more than 6 images and 500 words.

The data

The data is taken from the VAST Mini Challenge 2 2018 webpage and it contains:

Data file	Metadata
Boonsong Legakul waterways readings (.csv)	This is the water sensor records along the Boonsong preserve waterways from years 1998-2016. - id (numeric) - Unique ID of each taken measurement - value (numeric) - Reading value of measure from water sensor - location (string) - Location name at which the reading was taken from - sample date (string) - Date of measurement - measure (string) - Chemical/parameter of measurement
chemical units of measure (.csv)	This file containts the list of measures that have been recorded and their corresponding unit of measure. - measure (string, unique) - Name of measure - unit (string) - Unit of measure
Waterways Final (.jpg)	The Waterways Final is a raster image of a map that shows the location of the dumping site and the flow of the waterways along the preserve.

What we know?

Ground scenario:
Boonsong Legakul is a wildlife preserve nearby the city of Mistford. The preserve is home to many species of wild animals and birds including the Rose crested blue pipit. Inside the preserve is also situated 5 furniture manufacturing factories, one of which is Kasios. These factories are suspected to be releasing chemical waste into the environment and causing the deaths/migration of the wildlife in the preserve. The case in hand, is a sequel to the previous case investigated last year, and is about the disappearance of the Rose crested blue pipit bird species from the preserve and the reason was proven to be the pollutants from the factories. Now the company is having it’s take against that research and stating against any contamination by dumping. They have even tested samples from the touted dumping site and mentioned it to be in pristine condition. Suspecting foul play, researchers head to the dumping site and find no evidence of contamination but are informed that there was recent construction activity at the spot. This could be a move to cover up the top layer contaminated soil, so they tend to the water sample readings taken over the years to re-create any possible evidence against Kasios.

Measures:
These 106 measures have been measured through time from the water sensors:

Map interpretation:
The preserve map is interpreted as below:

Tools used

The tools used to perform the entire scope of this analysis are:

1. Tableau
2. SAS JMP PRO
3. Microsoft Excel
4. R (dplyr)

References

1. VAST Challenge 2017 - Mini Challenge 2
2. EPA Ground water regulations
3. Water Quality Index
4. Toxic chemicals to birds
5. Water Quality Trend analysis
6. Tableau viz of the week - Influenza
7. Year over year comparison in Tableau