The Project: https://covidearthinitiative.us/index.html
Our main goal for this project was to analyze how much of a positive impact reduced human traffic had on natural environments, and from there, inspire people to want to continue positively impacting these environments. Our project used data provided by NASA and other organizations to analyze the differences in NO2 and Aerosol levels from this year, which had significantly less human traffic, compared to last year, which had a great amount of human traffic. Our project directly shows the positive impacts that reduced human traffic has had on the health of one national park, and then presents the data in a way that would be easy for people to see the trends and results. We were able to incorporate solid data into our project followed by a solution to bring more awareness to the issue of human traffic negatively affecting national parks.
Our project has made it accessible to see not only the impact that human traffic can have on specific national parks, but also has provided tips for visitors and park managers on what they can do to help the health of our national parks continue on a positive trend, all on one web page. We did the research and we found solutions, our further goals will involve reaching out to the national parks to have them include links to our project on their web pages. This will ensure that anyone looking to visit the parks will be aware of the negative impacts that human traffic has on the environment, and will be aware of what they can do to prevent it.
When reading the description of A New Perspective, we were intrigued by the idea of seeing how much of an impact humans can really have on this earth. Due to COVID-19, we knew that human traffic had significantly reduced in some of the nation's national parks, causing positive outcomes such as reduced emissions. We wanted to make a project that would help national parks sustain some of these new health once parks started reopening and human traffic started increasing once again. Our approach to this revolved around bringing more awareness to the issue. Most people who visit national parks do not intentionally plan to harm the environment, they are simply unaware that some of the things they do contribute to the declining health of some of these natural environments. Our project aims to make it easier for park visitors to see the direct impact that they have on national parks, while also providing tips on how they can help reduce their negative impact.
Using data obtained from NASA’s Giovanni web interface and the US Geological Study, our team used R to study the differences in the environment between 2019 and 2020. Giovanni was used to access variables such as the optical depth of aerosols, the number of nitrogen dioxide molecules, the amount of transpiration and vegetation, and the molar fraction of methane over a rectangular section of land around the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The US Geological study was used to obtain the quality of water of the French Broad River and the Catawba River, which were chosen based on their proximity to the park and Charlotte, a large city.
Each dataset was split into its 2019 and 2020 equivalents, focusing on the available data during the months of January through May of both years. First, we attempted to plot daily values for each year in a scatterplot to display the change of each variable over time. In order to provide a more clear comparison between the two years, however, we averaged the data for each month and plotted the results as a bar graph. This allowed us to see how human traffic, or the lack thereof, generally impacted the environment.
The project wasn’t without its challenges; since 2020 is a leap year and 2019 was not, the difference in dates had to be accounted for. Certain datasets often didn’t have the data points that we needed - while we planned to study the French Broad River in more depth because of its location within the park, the data provided by the US Geological Study began in June of 2019. This wouldn’t have given us an accurate comparison between 2019 and 2020, but we were still able to graph the points we had for 2020 and examine any trends between January and May.
In the end, we were able to identify changes in aerosols, nitrogen dioxide, and transpiration within the Great Smoky National Park as well as a change in water temperature and dissolved oxygen within the Catawba River. This successfully confirmed our prediction that less human traffic would lead to an improvement in air and water quality.
NASA Giovanni Web Interface (aerosols, methane, nitrogen dioxide, transpiration, vegetation): https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/
The US Geological Study (water temperature, water pH, dissolved oxygen): https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis