Example Scientific Databrowsers

A scientific databrowser is the ultimate end product of our work. These web-based systems allow users to play with the data, creating on-the-fly visualizations based on user input. Examples of our work are included below.

Click on an image to go to a working example.

Oil Export

Access to fossil fuels is one of the most important issues of our time. The world's largest economies are extremely dependent upon imported supplies of oil and gas. Understanding trends in production and consumption of oil, coal and natural gas is of critical importance in today's world.

This databrowser uses data from the 2008 BP Statistical Review and displays coal, oil & natural gas production and consumption timelines for each country in the database and several political and geographic groupings of nations. Users can dynamically plot import/export curves to get a sense of who the major fossil fuel producers and consumers are and how this has changed in the last four decades.

EPA Probabilistic Survey Analysis

EPA’s regional surveys were designed to collect data that are representative of conditions throughout the sampled area. Random site selection ensures that summary statistics derived from the data are unbiased and can be used to guide planning and management efforts at a regional scale.

This databrowser displays summary statistics for measures of biological condition, water chemistry, and site condition for wadeable streams. Users may test for correlation among response variables and human influence. Users may also subset the data and compare summary statistics and patterns of correlation according to year, state, stream order, or other factors.

This work was funded by the EPA Office of Environmental Information.

EPA Relative Risk Analysis

Relative risk is a statistical method widely applied in human health reporting to summarize and compare the risk of developing an illness for a given set of factors. This approach has been adapted to summarize the effects of different stressors on the environmental health of streams. Because streams experience a variety of stressors (e.g., increased nutrients, loss of riparian habitat, sediment), resource managers need a method to identify which threats present the greatest risk in order to implement effective programs to protect them. Relative risk summarizes the strength of the association between a stressor and an indicator of stream condition.

This databrowser links relative risk calculations to the national Wadeable Streams Assessment data set. Benthic macroinvertebrates were used to assess stream condition. The databrowser allows users to compare the relative importance of various stressors across political or ecological regions.

This work was funded by the EPA Office of Environmental Information.