Written: June 2018 (Kernel)
Here is a summary of the analysis I performed on the Mussel Watch dataset. If you would like to see the complete analysis, please see my kernel on Kaggle.
Mussel Watch is a marine monitoring program under NOAA founded in 1986. The program monitors more than 140 contaminants across the major waters in the United States.
Here's what the yearly records look like, the data covers 30 years from 1986 to 2015. Approximately 50% of entries are before 2001 and 50% of entries are after 2001.
Figure 2 shows the most popular places where Mussel Watch operates.
I'm going to split the data into two time periods... Data recorded before 2001 and data collected on 2001 or later. I'd like to see if contiminant levels have changed in anyway over the past 30 years.
If we look at the plot below, it appears they have! Almost all the substance levels dropped earlier levels. This plot gives me hope that new environmental practices are helping.
Figure 4 shows the median measurement levels for a substance in a particular year. From looking at figure 2, we can see different organisms have different substance levels. To avoid variation as a result of different organisms, I restricted the following plot to only sediment measurements.
Finally, we can see below the different shapes and sizes of mussels.
A few things to note:
Thank you for viewing this summary, if you would like to see the complete, more extensive version, please see my kernel on Kaggle.