Welcome to the LAGOS Visualization Blog. Here we will post interesting and fun visualizations of data from LAGOS as well as other posts that we find interesting to share and talk about. In this blog, we focus mostly on data visualizations because it is not easy to fully capture the complexity of macroscale data, which includes a range of environmental characteristics
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By Patrick Hanly While citizen scientists are already known to be a vital source of water quality data, they have also been quietly amassing a substantial collection of species records through digital platforms such as the popular iNaturalist. For example, there are 900,000 dragonfly and damselfly records on iNaturalist as of August 2020. Although iNaturalist was created with the goal of
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By Jessica Díaz Vázquez I joined the Data Intensive Landscape Limnology Lab in October 2018 to gain research experience in the general field of ecology. As I learned more about the database LAGOS and the openness of the lab for interdisciplinary research, I saw an opportunity to incorporate my interest in environmental justice. I grew up in Northeast Houston, Texas
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I was motivated to apply for this particular REU position as, growing up in northern Michigan, I have always been interested in nature and ecology, and I wanted to be able to apply my math degree in areas that would allow me to pursue these interests. It has been an amazing learning opportunity for me to apply things I have
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This animation shows the accumulation of water quality observations for each of the lakes in the LAGOS-NE database. For each year and lake, the cumulative count of in water quality observations to date is shown by color. The first field observation in the database was recorded in 1933 from Lake Pepin (WI/MN). The lake with the most data points across
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We are thrilled to announce that the LAGOS-NE data paper is published, which means that the underlying data are live: https://academic.oup.com/gigascience/article/doi/10.1093/gigascience/gix101/4555226 Creating something like LAGOS-NE takes a wide range of contributions, expertise, and types of work. We want to extend a HUGE thanks to everyone who contributed. This effort could not have happened without the willingness of people to work
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These maps are from a recent paper by JF Lapierre et al. that compared the factors that control lake CO2 at the continental scale. He found that the spatial patterns in lake pCO2 driver‐response relationships translated into the formation of spatial clusters of pCO2 “regulation” that are shown in map (e) even though there is little apparent regional pattern in pCO2
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This map is from this article by Sarah Collins et al. It clearly shows how spatial patterns in TP and TN alone do not lead to similar patterns in the ratio of TN:TP. Also, spatial pattern in TN and TP are similar, but not identical and there are some interesting outliers, e.g., Michigan lakes. See the article for details on
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Emi Fergus et al. published a recent paper that describes the complex features of the freshwater landscape. These maps are very compelling in that they show that there are very different patterns between freshwater ABUNDANCE versus CONNECTIVITY. FIGURE DESCRIPTION (Figure and text from Fergus et al. 2017): Freshwater abundance and connectivity maps by system type. Freshwater abundance is quantified as
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This figure shows the distribution of the underlying data in Oliver et al 2017 (see below). Interestingly, when you look at all data, it is difficult to discern any patterns. While the study found that on average lakes weren’t changing in chlorophyll, roughly 15% of lakes were either increasing or decreasing in chlorophyll. Samantha Oliver made this GIF using data
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