fieldPET

Full-stack field notes app for entering and visualizing stream water quality data

Some Buggy Background

• Benthic Macroinvertebrates (stream bugs) are commonly used to assess water quality of freshwater streams on the East Coast

• The composition and quantity of the stream bug population can provide insights to the overall condition of the stream

• Certain groups of bugs, like stoneflys, are very sensitive to ecological disturbance (such as pollution)

• Other groups of bugs are less sensitive (like midges). These bugs tend to indicate poor water quality when their numbers proportionally outweigh other less-tolerant species

• Benthic Macroinvertebrate Water Quality Monitoring is conducted by in large-part by volunteers, but also by government employees, indsutry-professionals, and academics across the State of Virginia

• Because a great deal of the data are collected by volunteers, accessible information and efficient tools are important for maintaining high-quality data

• fieldPET aims to provide an easy-to-use field application, primarily used for collecting data. As a bonus, condition index scores are automatically calculated. Users are also able to access historical data, all in one app!

Technology and Tools

Field Pet uses several node packages, libraries, and frameworks.

MVC Framwork:

• express
• express-handlebars

Database:

• mysql2
• sequelize
• sequelize-CLI

Data-manipulation and visualization:

• CSV-parser -- parsing historical data and inputting larger batches of new data)
• charts.js -- charts and figure generation for viewing historical data

User experience:

• materialize
• jQuery

Walk-Through

FieldPET is a bug counting app that collects data of specific bugs in specific locations. This allows metrics contained within the app to determine water quality.

Upon first entering the website a site volunteer with given credentials will input the quantity on each of the specific bugs:

Next the user will hit submit and enter their credentials and the date the count was collected:

Finally FieldPET will return with water quality information:

A user can also view graphs of information created by data used from the database:

Acknowledgements and Contributions

Thank you to the Izaak Walton and VASOS league for data and resources

Kensey Barker (https://github.com/kenzrad) - Back End Framework and Data Processing, Charts integration, Metrics and Analysis

Thomas Smith (https://github.com/slowpossum)- Front End Development and Design, Logo and Icon Art, Optimization

Molly Levine(https://github.com/levinemr2) - API calls, Charts integration

Austin Kim (https://github.com/powerpcg5)- Data File Formatting, Research