The US Forest Service collects waterway samples and measures them for sediment concentration. Changes to sediment concentration (also called sediment load) can have multiple causes, for instance, seasonal changes, local precipitation, climate change, nearby logging operations, nearby construction or other activities that cause soil erosion near waterways.
The data used in this analysis was collected by Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest personnel in northern Idaho, and stored, with sediment load calculations, in Excel. It contains more than three decades of sediment data for a single waterway location.
Data processing and analysis performed in Jupyter Notebooks using Python pandas and matplotlib.
River Sediment - Raw Data Import imports raw data from Excel. Data is cleaned up and prepared for analysis.
River Sediment - EDA explores data with statistical analysis and data visualization.
This is a work in progress with potential for additional data analysis.
Dataset processing and analysis by Laura Williams. Laura Williams is not a Forest Service employee; data processing and analysis are not necessarily endorsed by the US Forest Service.
Photo credit: Idaho Travel Council