Bronx River trash collection and fecal material analysis

This project was a group effort including myself and Drew Stanley, Seth Crider, De Han, Nat Quinn, and Lindsay Menachemi, and a partnership with the Bronx River Alliance (BRA). Two datasets were provided by the BRA—a trash collection dataset and a enterococcus (a bacteria found in fecal material) dataset. The team analyzed and visualized these two datasets, and presented their findings as a large-scale poster and blog post. Please access the blog post for the full writeup.

Questions

The BRA tasked us with analyzing their data to answer a series of questions. For the trash dataset: Which booms collect the most trash and is Westchester County contributing a large amount of trash to the river? Additionally, we were asked to analyze which side of the river collects the most trash, and what trends over time do we see with trash collection?

For the enterococcus dataset: Where are sources of sewage discharge into the river, do enterococcus levels correlate with rainfall, and do sewage treatment facility locations correlate with sewage discharge?

Enterococcus Analysis

The team split up into two smaller teams, half focused on the trash collection dataset and the other half on the enterococcus dataset. I was a member of the latter team. My primary contribution was the visualization below, representing enterococcus counts at collection locations as a series of maps of the Bronx River, organized so the quantity of rain over the preceding four days increases to the right of the visualization.

This visualization helps us understand the effect rain has on enterococcus counts, and lends evidence to the hypothesis that sewage runoff into the Bronx River is a concern in the health of the river.

FInal poster design

In addition to the visualization seen above, I designed the basemap used in the full size poster, as well as contributing to the overall design of the poster. The poster was designed to tell two stories, one for the trash collection dataset down the left side of the poster, and a story for the enterococcus dataset down the right side with space in the middle for the map to allow for spatial reference. The poster design was challenging, and went through a UX research process to refine the design and story telling.

Results and further thoughts

Overall, with the data given to us we were able to identify some definitive patterns that begin to answer these questions, but some questions needed more analysis and more detailed data. The data was incomplete and had collection issues, so we were a bit limited in the conclusions we could draw.