Data Viz for Long-term Ecological Research and Curricula

Project Summary

Devri Adams (Environmental Science), Annie Lott (Statistics), and Camila Vargas Restrepo (Visual Media Studies, Psychology) spent ten weeks creating interactive and exploratory visualizations of ecological data. They worked with over sixty years of data collected at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF) in New Hampshire.

Themes and Categories
Energy & Environment
Data+
Year
2017

Project Results: The team created a "data stories" website aimed at high school students and undergraduates in introductory ecology courses, with the goal of teaching canonical lessons using tangible data. They also used R Shiny to create an open-source exploratory dashboard which will allow researchers to examine data at various time scales, and to generate and test novel hypotheses.

Partially funded by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

Faculty Lead: Emily Bernhardt

Project Managers: Richard Marinos, Matt Ross, Gene Likens

Download the Executive Summary

Related People

Related Projects

Racial Disproportionality and Disparities in the Child Welfare System: Child Protective Services and Foster Care

Nationally there is a disproportionate number of children of color (African American & Latino) in the child welfare system. Durham County is no different. However, reviewing this problem through the lens of data has not been done to formulate or implement possible solutions. Durham County Department of Social Services Child & Family Services would like to evaluate systems to identify where and how disproportionality and disparity are occurring. It is occurring at the entry point of Reporting child abuse and neglect? Is it occurring at the case decision? Is our reunification time different for African American children? Or Does it take longer for a child of color to achieve permanence through adoption? Organizing the data to show us our “hot spots” would facilitate further discussion and focus on solutions to an age-old systemic problem.

Faculty Lead: Greg Herschlag

Project Lead: Jovetta L Whitfield

Agile Waveform Design in the Presence of Opposition: Quantifying Performance

Student teams will develop a benchmark dataset and explore its efficacy in an in house competition where they will put new innovative techniques such as machine learning to the test through a series of challenges.  A team of students will develop benchmark data pertaining to network performance in the presence of intentional and non-intentional degradation, ranging from sensor failure and additive noise to adversarial interference.  The students will analyze the baseline performance of the network, and measure performance of the degraded network with and without the inclusion of robust techniques that shore up robustness.  Students will have the opportunity to present findings to scientists & engineers from the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Faculty leads: Robert Calderbank, Vahid Tarokh, Ali Pezeshki

Client leads: Dr. Lauren Huie, Dr. Elizabeth Bentley, Dr. Zola Donovan, Dr. Ashley Prater-Bennette, Dr. Erin Trip

Dashboard for Public Investments

A team of students will use visual reporting tools, such as Tableau or Power Bi, to create a dynamic dashboard that will enable investment professionals at Duke University Management Company (DUMAC) to review and better understand fund managers’ exposures and positioning across various dimensions.  Students will collaborate with teams at DUMAC to develop an intuitive, visual dashboard to help the investment team review individual and portfolio-level exposures across numerous asset classes.  This dashboard will be connected to DUMAC’s data warehouse, which refreshes on a daily basis as new data comes in for DUMAC’s public market accounts.

See all Research