In our fifty-two years of existence, Lake James Environmental Association has accumulated quite a bit of data about our watershed. The past twenty-five years of this data is stored in various spreadsheets and databases that we've used for much of our research. While we've done a very good job of accumulating this data, we haven't done a great job of organizing and publishing it in a user-friendly way for our members or even for our internal use.
Last year, Lake James Environmental Association participated in a summer Data Science mentorship program with high school students at the North Carolina School of Science and Math. This program gives summer NCSSM students experience in solving real data issues and it has helped LJEA make our data more "user friendly." This year, LJEA is fortunate enough to re-engage with NCSSM's Data Science mentorship program to extend last year's work, and we are very excited about the work the students are producing.
Under the guidance of NCSU graduate student Shih-Ni Prim and NCSSM instructor Jane Cantwell, our 2025 Mentees, Athena Phan and Pranav Bhatnager, are producing a dashboard that pulls our 25 years of data into one place. Via dropdown selection, users will be able to view chemical, biological, and habitat data in time series, box plot, and scatter plot graphs. There will also be correlation matrices available on the dashboard. This week, the students are finalizing the dashboard, and with the time left in our six-week mentorship, they are beginning to look at predictive modeling for LJEA's data. We will make all of this available on our website next month.
Over the last two summers, we've worked to ensure students understand the data they are modeling. Throughout the summer, we've taken our mentees out of the classroom to give them field experience collecting samples in streams, performing habitat analysis and biological surveys, as well as a visit to the EQI lab where our water samples are processed.
We are very excited about what Athena and Pranav are producing. Moreover, we continue to be impressed with the faculty and students that we are lucky enough to work with at the North Carolina School of Science and Math.
