Pivers Island Coastal Observatory

Project Summary

Stats majors Alexandra Lawrence and Morgan Pruchniewski spent ten weeks exploring a dataset comprising 619 variables, including chemical and biological measurements, sourced from the Pivers Island Coastal Observatory (PICO). Using modern time-series analysis techniques, the team delivered key insights to PICO scientific staff, as well as advice for future data collection protocols.

 

View the team's project poster here

Watch the team's final presentation on Zoom:

 

Project Lead: Zackary Johnson

Themes and Categories
Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Energy & Environment
Data+, Genomics and the Life Sciences
Year
2021
Contact
Paul Bendich
Mathematics
bendich@math.duke.edu

Related Projects

Farm to Fork (Year 2)

A team of students collaborating with Duke School of Medicine's Root Causes Fresh Produce Program, community members, and physicians throughout the Duke Health network will help integrate data from food deliveries to Duke Health patients with patient health record data and other available data sources to create a dashboard that can analyze, predict, and manage the Root Causes' "Food as Medicine" program. Specific outcomes will contribute to improving the Program's quantitative evaluation of its health impact as well as efficiency and satisfaction for its patients. Students will be assisted with IRB approval and mentorship from faculty and community advisors.

Project Leads: Esko Brummel, Willis Wong

Melting Ice, Shifting Krill

A team of students led by researchers at the Duke Marine Lab will explore the changing distribution of krill around the Antarctic Peninsula. Krill are a key prey species in this ecosystem, supporting a number of animals including whales, seals, and penguins, but they are dependent on winter sea ice and may be in trouble as climate change progresses. Using data from acoustic zooplankton surveys, students will create maps and other products to visualize the spatial distribution of krill over the past 20 summers, then create metrics that allow us to quantify the way that krill distribution around the Antarctic Peninsula is changing as the climate shifts and ice melts. These results will be key to our understanding of the impacts of climate change on this polar ecosystem.

 

Project Lead: Douglas Nowacek

Project Manager: Amanda Lohmann

 

Data Science for Community Safety in Durham

A team of students will partner closely with the City of Durham's newly formed Community Safety Department.  The Community Safety Department's mission is to identify, implement, and evaluate new approaches to enhance public safety that may not involve a law enforcement response or the criminal justice system. The student team will (1) analyze and identify geographic and temporal patterns in 911 calls for service, (2) conceptualize and build an abstracted data pipeline and tools that would enrich currently available 911 data with other social, economic, and health-related data, (3) explore associations between areas of high call volume, indicators of mental health distress, and histories of dispossession; and (4) identify methods by which future researchers could examine connections between varied 911 incident responses (e.g. police response, unarmed response, joint police, and mental health response) and life trajectories (e.g. arrest, jail time, hospitalization, unemployment, etc.).

 

Project Lead: Greg Herschlag, Anise Van, City of Durham

 

 

See all Research