Earlier this month, DRBC Senior Aquatic Biologist Robert Limbeck presented at the National Water Quality Monitoring Council’s 10th National Monitoring Conference in Tampa, Fl. His presentation, Enhancing Data Interpretation in the Delaware River Basin with R (pdf 1.2 MB), focused on the commission’s use of R scripts as a way to view, analyze, and animate water quality and flow data. Data analysis and graphical display using R is becoming a major innovation in water quality studies, especially for large data sets. DRBC is at the forefront of utilizing and sharing results generated by this data tool and also serves as host of the R-Project list-serv for the National Water Quality Monitoring Council.
Examples of water quality data that are graphically displayed include dissolved oxygen, temperature, and total dissolved solids; these plots can be viewed at http://drbc.net/Sky/waterq.htm. Examples of flow data that are graphically displayed include water yields for basin subwatersheds, discharge data for the mainstem Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, and surface water elevation in the tidal Delaware River; these plots can be viewed at http://drbc.net/Sky/flows.htm.
In addition to discussing DRBC’s use of R scripts, Bob also presented a poster on the Lower Delaware Water Quality Assessment. This was the first of planned assessments undertaken to show whether current water quality is being protected in this section of the Delaware River. The Lower Delaware is part of the commission’s Special Protection Waters (SPW) program; the purpose of the program is to maintain existing water quality targets established in 2005 that are typically better than water quality standards. More information on this assessment will be publicly available later this year.
