Overview

The Tree Huggers project delves into the critical issues surrounding California’s water crisis, focusing on drought, environmental injustices, and water quality disparities across counties. We will conduct a rigorous analysis of historical drought patterns, highlighting the pressing need for sustainable water management practices to mitigate these challenges effectively.

Objective

We aim to identify and explain complexities of California’s water issues, ranging from the unequal distribution of water quality to the systemic injustices embedded within environmental policies. By leveraging data from credible sources, our objective is to uncover the causes driving these issues, informing strategies aimed at fostering equitable water management and enhancing water quality.

Datasets

• The CDC’s Environmental Justice Index (EJI): examine how health outcomes associated with water scarcity, helps identify the communities most affected by water quality issues
• NOAA’s climate and drought projections: understand how climate change will affect California’s drought frequency and severity in the future, provides insights into long-term water management strategies
• Department of Water Resources in California: distribution and use of water rights, helps identify areas with water scarcity
• CalEnviroScreen: map regions according to demographic characteristics and pollution burden, highlights areas of vulnerability and the need for targeted interventions
• SAFER Dashboard Failing and At-Risk Drinking Water Systems: data on water system quality to identify communities with low water access and quality
• USGS Water Use Data: historical background on California’s water usage trends across different sectors, helps understand demand and stress on water resources

Nikolas Brandt

Nik is a third-year Computer Science major trying to figure out what to do with his life, as many of us are. In his quest, he’s found computers and technology interesting, but would like to complement those skills with a humanities focus. For this project, he created visualizations, wrote a fair portion of the narrative, and helped weave sources throughout the text. He also helped touch up the website and managed citations.

Nyah Clovis

Nyah Clovis is a third-year Cognitive Science major with a Specialty in Computation passionate about harnessing technology to explore and improve human conditions. As content specialist, she aided in finding viable data sets and accessing resources for information collection. Additionally, she explored alternative perspectives and curated the literary review. She also created data visualizations on Tableau and a timeline on Timeline JS, researching to find information to include for the plot and each historical point. Nyah also improved the aesthetics of the website, adding stylistic details like color, headers, and information separators.

Abel Lula

Abel Lula is a fourth-year Statistics & Data Science student that is passionate about working in the sports industry through data science. Using his data science knowledge, he assisted in finding, cleaning, and analyzing the data and created a data visualization using Tableau. Abel assisted in transforming complex insights into captivating visuals, enhancing the impact of the work done. He also assisted in writing the narrative and creating the bibliography.

Jane Zou

Jane Zou is a third-year Statistics & Data Science student passionate about biological data analysis and corporate sustainability. She wrote the introduction, giving a thoughtful explanation of the project’s importance and establishing the project’s tone. She enhanced the project’s presentation by using her statistical expertise to collect, clean, and analyze data and produce an engaging Tableau map of Environmental Justice Indices per county and the R visualization of California’s water usage per sector. Jane also revised the visualization captions to ensure they were consistent to enhance the cohesiveness of the project.