7SSGN110 – Environmental Data Analysis

Module Syllabus [SEM1, 2024‒25]

Assignment Details

Coursework Assignment #1 (optional):

This assignment comprises 0% of the TOTAL MARK for this module, it is purely formative (optional)

The WORD LIMIT is 500 words.

The submission deadline is as indicated on your KEATS module page under the section Assessment and Feedback.

This assignment will be marked using the Coursework criteria detailed in the Geography Student Handbook.

Write a report to compare daily water levels in the River Frome, Dorset, to rainfall amounts in the upstream catchment, over the period May 2003 – April 2005. You should use data and outcomes of EDA Practical 1 along with data downloaded from the UK National River Flow Archive (NRFA) website. Use Excel to analyse and present the data. Put your work into an appropriate context by introducing peer-review and other types of literature, appropriately formatted, to illustrate your points. Remember to follow the guidelines for proper formatting of the coursework.

In addition to the data analyses in Practical 1 of EDA you should analyse daily rainfall data for the River Frome, Dorset. Moggridge and Goodson (2005) collected their data at Frampton, upstream of gauging station 44004 ‘Frome at Dorchester’. Information about stations and the data collected at them are available online from the NRFA website which is managed by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH). The NRFA website URL is: http://nrfa.ceh.ac.uk You should download daily rainfall data and plot a time series of rainfall for the period that matches that of the data collected by Moggridge and Goodson (2005). You will then be able to compare rainfall to water level.

Your coursework should include three figures, each with a caption so that it can be interpreted independently of the main text (if complete, these captions should account for around 200 words of the word limit).

Your three figures should comprise:

· A scatter plot depicting the calibration for the PT voltage outputs

· A time series of daily water level in the river Frome at Frampton for the data collected by Moggridge and Goodson (2005)

· A time series of daily rainfall in the catchment of the river Frome upstream of Dorchester

Remember that your figure captions should indicate the source of the data they present.

Structure your report using numbered sub-headings. A suggested structure for your report is:

1. Introduction: Provide a brief overview of the River Frome, Dorset, and its hydrology.

2. Data: Briefly describe the data examined in the report.

3. Methods: Briefly describe how pressure transducer voltage outputs were converted to water level readings. The scatter plot would likely be best presented in this section.

4. Results & Analysis: Compare the two time-series you created, to identify similarities, differences and any possible relationships between water level and rainfall. Discuss what you find with reference to the hydrology of the River Frome, Dorset and the likely processes that produced the observed trends.

Background to the field data collected by Moggridge and Goodson (2005) can be found in:

· Gurnell et al. (2006), available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/rra.929; Moggridge and Goodson (2005) collected their data at site B in this study

· Cotton et al. (2006), available from http://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2006.01.010; One of the sites in this study was also near Dorchester.

You can, of course, cite other sources that you think are useful. Note that we have not given you proper citations for Gurnell et al. (2006) and Cotton et al. (2006) as you will need to cite these properly yourself in the reference list at the end of your report. You will also need to include a proper reference for the NRFA data you use. You can use the same reference for Moggridge and Goodson (2005) as provided below.

This coursework is your first on this module (formative, for feedback only) and likely also your first at King’s. Its purpose is for you to demonstrate your understanding of the fundamentals of data analysis, manipulation and presentation, and how we expect you to present your written coursework in the Dept. of Geography at King’s. You should take care to present and format your report as indicated in the Basic Skills materials you have received.

References Cited

Kabacoff, R.I. (2012) Quick R [Online] Available at: http://www.statmethods.net/graphs/index.html [Accessed 17 September 2015].

Moggridge, H. and Goodson, J. (2005) River Frome Electronic Data. Collected as part of NERC research grant NER/T/S/2001/00930 (LOCAR programme).

Coursework Assignment #2:

This assignment comprises 100% of the TOTAL MARK for this module

The WORD LIMIT is 2500 words

The submission deadline is as indicated on your KEATS module page under the section Assessment and Feedback.

This assignment will be marked using the Coursework criteria detailed in the Geography Student Handbook.

Perform. quantitative analyses on a dataset of your choice from the broad environmental sciences (aquatic, atmosphere, terrestrial, marine, urban, etc.). See below for guidance on finding an appropriate dataset for analysis.

Use two fundamentally different kinds of advanced quantitative analyses, at least one of which should have been covered in the module (i.e. at least one of: inferential statistics, correlation/regression, time-series analysis, data reduction). The two types of analysis should be comprehensive and utilise the full range of opportunities provided by the data.

Descriptive statistics (including tables of stats, histograms, boxplots, etc.) are considered preliminary exploration/description and does NOT count as one of the advanced quantitative analyses. Visual presentation of your data or time-series plotting does NOT count as quantitative analysis. A simple KS-test that can be achieved with one button in SPSS or one line-command in R does NOT qualify as comprehensive.

Write a report that demonstrates your skills in analysing these data, based on simple research questions or objectives.

Your report should include the following numbered sub-sections:

1. Introduction: State and explain the type of data or environmental variable(s) you have analysed and what the main goal of this analysis is. Provide some context in terms of relevant published research

2. Data and Methods:

1. Describe how the data were collected, or where they come from

2. Describe the spatial and/or temporal characteristics of the data (resolution, precision, organisation or structure of the dataset)

3. Outline the quantitative methods used to analyse the data - explain why these methods are appropriate given the characteristics of the data. Include only brief reference to the software used to perform. the analyses. Methods that have been presented in lectures do not need to be explained, except details or parameters that are unique to this study

3. Results: Present results from your quantitative data analyses using tables and figures as appropriate; see further guidance on figure and tables below.

4. Analysis and Discussion:

1. Interpret the results with reference to the introductory context

2. Discuss possible further study and/or management implications

5. References: see guidance below

Cover sheet

The front page of your report should include a filled out cover sheet (provided on KEATS). On the cover sheet you have to provide some short details on the analyses that you included in your report, as well as the details on the data that you used in your report (note that this does not replace the description of data and analysis in the report itself).

Data

You will need to find an environmental data set for either at least one variable that changes through time (minimum 400 values per variable) or several variables such that the total number of data values is at least 400 (with minimum 4 variables and minimum 20 records per variable; e.g. a data matrix of 8 variables each with 50 records = 400 data values). Examples of some excellent sources of environmental data are: CDIAC (2015), CEH (2015), Dryad (2015), ECN (2015), KCL (2015), LTER (2015), NBN (2015), NCDC (2015), NGDC (2015), USGS (2015).

The following specific requirements also apply:

1. FIGURES and TABLES. Use a MINIMUM of 4 and a MAXIMUM of 10 figures and/or tables. Note that one figure can have multiple parts to it (use peer-reviewed journals as examples, labelling each part A, B, C, with ONE figure caption for the entire figure). Remember tables and figures are not limited to use only in the results section.

2. REFERENCES. Your coursework should include 15 or more references from peer-reviewed journal articles (and will most likely include many more than 15).

Remember to follow the guidelines for proper formatting of the coursework and as indicated in the ‘Basic Skills' material you received at the start of term. These will aid you to make your coursework look much more professional in terms of tables, figures, etc.

References Cited
CEH (2017) The Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (Data Holdings) [Online] Available at: https://www.ceh.ac.uk/data [Accessed 13 September 2017]. Includes large set of data holdings hosted by CEH on ecology and hydrology in the UK.
Dryad (2017) The Dryad Digital Repository [Online] Available at: http://datadryad.org/ [Accessed 13 September 2017]. Freely re-useable data files associated with published article from across the sciences and medicine.
ECN (2017) The Environmental Change Network Data Centre [Online] Available at: http://data.ecn.ac.uk/ [Accessed 13 September 2017]. Manages data for five UK integrated environmental monitoring networks.
ESS-DIVE (2017) Environmental System Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem. [Online] Available at: http://ess- dive.lbl.gov/ [Accessed 13 September 2017]. ESS-DIVE is designed to provide long-term stewardship and use of data from observational, experimental, and modeling activities from research across a range of scientific disciplines including hydrogeology, geophysics, biogeochemistry, climate, and ecology.
KCL (2017) The London Air Quality Network. [Online]. Available at: http://www.londonair.org.uk/ [Accessed 13 September 2017]. Access to wide range of pollutant measurements, by specific London area, for (in some cases) back to 1993, and depending on measurement, with 15' resolution. See ‘Download Data'.
LTER (2017) The US Long Term Ecological Research Network Data Portal. [Online] Available at: http://portal.lternet.edu [Accessed 13 September 2017]. Contains over 6000 metadata entries for ecological datasets contributed by 27 past and present LTER sites.
NBN (2017) National Biodiversity Network Atlas [Online] Available at: https://data.nbn.org.uk/ [Accessed 13 September 2017].
Data gateway for NBN UK biodiversity data (>100 million species records)
NCDC (2017) USA National Climatic Data Center, Climate Data Online. [Online]. Available at: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/ [Accessed 13 September 2017]. World's largest archive of weather data. If you have problems downloading any of this data, you may need to use a geography master's room computer, as these IP addresses should be ‘recognized' as academic ones.
NGDC (2017) USA National Geophysical Data Center Home Page. [Online]. Available at: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/ [Accessed 13 September 2017]. Links to large amounts of data, including palaeodata, pertinent to physical geographers.

USGS (United States Geological Survey) (2017) USGS Water Resources. [Online] Available at: http://water.usgs.gov/ [Accessed 13 September 2017]. Extensive selection of water related data.