2019 Project X

Wipe Out


Project  due Friday 5/3/19 at 4:59 pm Chicago time



This optional extra single person project is worth up to an extra 5%, and anyone who has a total score less than 66% overall in the course is eligible.


The project will make use of the online Jupyter notebook that we used in week 12

https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/binder-examples/r/master?filepath=index.ipynb


The project is to look at beach water quality data in Chicago from 5/2015 to 9/2018 during the summer seasons at roughly 20 beach locations. There is detail on the data here: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Parks-Recreation/Beach-Lab-Data-DNA-Tests/hmqm-anjq


and a local copy available at http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/424/chicagobeach.csv


The most useful columns are:


Your Jupyter notebook report should allow a person interested in going to the beach or someone responsible for beach safety to better understand what is going on during the summer at Chicago's beaches. Your report should show:


- the locations of the monitored beaches

- overall data for all the beaches

- data about each beach (90%, average, 10% data for each beach, overall percentage of good and bad days at each beach) to help answer whether there particular beaches that are safer than others

- data from a weekly point of view as the summers go on to help answer whether there particular times of the year that are better or worse

- data from year to year to see if things getting better or worse over the last several years

You should also relate the data to temperature and rainfall data to see if there is a correlation. You should already have some experience with that kind of data.



Your report should contain a mixture of explanatory text, R code, and visualizations, and be written to help the reader get a better understanding of the situation by explaining what they can see in the various visualizations.



To turn in your solution, download your solution as a notebook, zip it, and email it to andy.  Note that this is also a very good way to save off your progress on the project and then be able to upload it again to continue.


Some additional details from the Chicago Data Portal:

The rapid testing method (qPCR analysis) is a new method that measures levels of pathogenic DNA in beach water. Unlike the culture based test that requires up to 24 hours of processing, the new rapid testing method requires a few hours for results. The Chicago Park District can use results of the rapid test to notify the public when levels exceed UPEPA recommended levels. US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) recommends notifying the public when DNA bacteria levels are above the federal water quality Beach Action Value (BAV), which is 1000*CCE. When DNA bacteria levels exceed 1000 CCE, a yellow or red flag will be implemented. For more information please refer to the USEPA Recreational Water Quality Criteria 


https://www.epa.gov/wqc/microbial-pathogenrecreational-water-quality-criteria



last revision 4/25/19