Science Stories: Adventures in Bay-Delta Data

One of life’s greatest joys is playing with data. However, not everyone has the time or experience needed to make fancy graphs. Fortunately, availability of on-line web applications that allow people with no data analysis experience to visualize status and trends of data across space and time has exploded in recent years.

Figure 1. Fish love data, but they need a little help making their graphs.

One of the first data visualization tools was the mapping widgets on the CDFW website. These maps allow you to plot the catch for different fish species as different size bubbles, and have been available since the late 1990s:

• 20mm Survey
• Fall Midwater Trawl
• Summer Townet
• Spring Kodiak Trawl

But we needed better ways to display data from multiple surveys at once at the click of a button. The website Bay Delta Live was launched in 2007 as a home for Bay-Delta data and data visualizations. It includes summaries, graphs, and interactive visualizations for water quality, operations, fish monitoring, and special studies.

A similar website, SacPas, was built specifically for synthesizing, summarizing, and displaying data for salmonids in the Central Valley. It allows a user to visualize data on salmon abundance, temperature thresholds, river conditions, and hydrologic conditions. It also lets you play with a nifty Chinook Salmon population model and download all the underlying data.

Figure 2. FLowWest's Central Valley Instream Rearing Habitat Calculator shiny app

Custom-built websites like Bay Delta Live and SacPas are great, but they are built by web developers, not fisheries scientists. Now, thanks to user-friendly data display tools such as Tableau and the increase in coding literacy among environmental scientists, more and more people can create their own on-line data visualizations. This means the number of data visualizations apps has grown astronomically in the past few years, and many apps are custom-built for specific scientific questions.

The Delta Science Program now hosts a number of these visualizations built with the R package “shiny’

Figure 3. You can now map all the stations monitored by IEP's long-term surveys.

• NEW: Map all the monitoring stations sampled by IEP’s long-term monitoring surveys (My personal favorite!)
• Put together all of the IEP zooplankton data with the Zooplankton integrated data set.
• Look at Salmon acoustic telemetry stations and release locations for the Sacramento River.
• Check out the future with the Delta Social Climate Change Vulnerability Risk app and Delta Flood Risk app.
• Look at Long-term Temperature Trends using point values from IEP surveys going back to 1959.

Other Shiny apps have launched recently on a variety of other platforms:

• Avery Kruger and Dylan Stompe (UC Davis) integrated all the data from IEP’s long-term fish monitoring in their Bay Delta Live SF Estuary Integrated Fish Survey Visualizer V1.00 app.
• Check out Delta imports and exports app.
• ICF’s incidental take app looks at hydrodynamics and fish salvage.
• Cramer Fish Sciences has made a Delta Hydrodynamics app. (Because you can never have too many ways of looking at hydrodynamics)
• Cramer’s Loss Calculator app.
• Cramer also produced an Emigrating Salmonid Habitat Estimation app, if you want to see how baby fish move out of the river.
• And if you haven’t had enough salmon, there is also the Winter Run Life Cycle Model Shiny app.
• The FlowWest Central Valley Instream Rearing Habitat Calculator app.
• The CalFishTrack acoustic telemetry Shiny app, and
• FlowWest’s SHOWR dashboard for looking at Shasta Reservoir operations to protect winter run Chinook Salmon.

Figure 4. CalFishTrack includes a Shiny App of their Survival Travel time And Routing Simulation (STARS).

USGS has developed several new dashboards for mapping water and water quality data:

• Water Dashboard
• Groundwater
• Water Quality

With all these tools out there, it’s one big data playground! If you’re interested in making your own, it’s easy to get started with Shiny. Visit the Learn Shiny video tutorial!