Long-term Water Temperature in the James River

A project in which I combine 15 years of water quality monitoring data and generate daily mean summary statistics for select variables, as well as produce an animated plot depicting seasonal patterns and inter-annual variation in water temperature at VCU's Rice River Center monitoring station, located in the upper estuarine portion of the James River. This work was completed in collaboration with Dr. Paul Bukaveckas of VCU's Center for Environmental Studies.

variables examined

• Temperature (TempC)
• pH (pH)
• Specific Conductance (SpCond_uScm)
• Turbidity (turb_NTU)
• Chlorophyll a (Chla)
• Oxygen Dissolved Saturation (ODOsat)
• Oxygen Dissolved (mg/L) (ODOmgl)

Files

This repository contains the following files and folders:

File/Folder Name	Description
annual summaries/	folder with source data in the form of .xlsx files. Each xlsx contains 1 year of data across some number of tabs
output_data/	folder with processed data files generated by RicePier_dailymeans_2009to23.Rmd
.gitignore	specifies intentionally untracked files to ignore
RicePier_dailymeans_2009to23.Rmd	R Markdown document calculating daily mean values from 2009 to 2023
benchmarkDOY_20C.csv	dataset containing DOY on which estuary first reached 20C seasonal benchmarks
animated_timeSeries.rmd	R Markdown document for creating animated time series visualization
jamesRiver-longterm-waterTemps.Rproj	R Project file
waterTemps_benchmarkLines.gif	final animation file

Requirements

The following libraries are required:

• tidyverse
• openxlsx
• gganimate
• gifski
• showtext