SECURE funded project
Statistical software to identify spatiotemporal patterns and coherence over river networks – A collaborative project between Statistics at UoG, Environment Agency and Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
In the final week of this 6-month project, Kelly Gallacher, a research assistant in Statistics, and Claire Miller (Statistics) delivered workshops for the Environment Agency (EA) and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) to launch the statistical software tools developed as part of this project. The tools enable users to identify dominant spatial and temporal patterns in data collected on river networks, and will help users to identify areas where water quality has remained stable over time or groups of monitoring sites that exhibit the same temporal pattern. Such information is valuable to inform and improve the design of future water quality monitoring programmes.
On 26th April 2016, a workshop was held for 15 EA employees at the DEFRA offices in London to illustrate the R package (‘stpca’) developed as part of this project. The R package contains demonstration river network data files along with full tutorial documentation and help files to enable users within the EA (or more widely) to use the approach. The R package and demonstration data files are available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5525/gla.researchdata.277
The methods developed within the ‘stpca’ package were integrated within the TIBCO Spotfire software by Kelly to allow users within SEPA to implement the methods within their standard modelling framework. An information and demonstration session was provided on 28th April 2016 for 9 SEPA employees in Stirling to illustrate the tool.
The project team are very grateful to Kelly for all of her hard work on the project and wish her well in her new position at Pharmaceutical Product Development (PPD).