Hackathon - Join us analyze data about water quality in the Santa Barbara area

This repository collects the material for the Santa Barbara R Users Meetup hackathon in collaboration with SB Channelkeeper (https://www.sbck.org). The goal is to help them to analyze and visualize their data using R tools.

Organization team: Chris, Dan, Elliott, Irene, Jamie, Julien, Mike and Tyler

More about the event: https://www.meetup.com/Santa-Barbara-R-Users-Group/events/251634940/

Data

We are going to look into the Stream Team database built by SB Channelkeeper. This program aims to to collect and disseminate data to measure the health of local streams. It is one of the most successful and longest running program of SB Channelkepper. This program samples 47 stream sites in the watersheds of the Goleta Valley, Carpinteria Valley and Ventura River. Data collection starts in 2001 and is still on going.

Official data portal: https://www.sbck.org/current-issues/water-quality-monitoring/download-our-data/

Note that we got a more recent version of the dataset for this event! This data set has been added to our event repository https://github.com/R-Meetup-SB/hackathon-201806

Goals

Here is a set of questions that SB Channelkeeper would be interested in knowing more about:

• Are sites meeting state water quality objectives?
• What parameters are primarily contributing to non-compliance?
• Map of good, fair, poor, performance by site
• Where are hot spots for exceedances?
• Map overlay of agricultural facilities and nitrate exceedances (see here for potential GIS layers: http://sbcblueprint.net)
• Interactive tool for annual Watershed Summary Reports

These are suggestions and each team is encouraged to come up with their own questions and data analaysis suggestions.

Hackathon

Timeline

To help with the event and be sure teams are exchanging and brainstorming, we would like to set few milestones for our hackathon. Suggested agenda:

1. Welcome and ice breaker (20min)
2. Data exploration (30min): We would like each team to do some data exploration and refine 2 ideas of what could be investigated with the available data
3. Reporting and group discussion to select few topics to tackle (20min)
4. Workflow development and implementation (1h30)
5. Reporting (20min)

Collaborative

We will work in teams of 3-4 participants. We hope we can create team in an organic way, but we might have to randomly assign people for time constrain reasons. We will promote the use of the mob programming concept (to be introduced) to foster collaboration within teams. Each team will work on a part of the project and will contribute to the final product.

Inclusive

Please be inclusive of your teammates independently of their coding level. Welcome, encourage, listen and discuss all people contributions to the final product of your team.