GAMUT News

iUTAH’s interdisciplinary approach to research creates interesting challenges and opportunities. One of these challenges involved the development of tools for communicating and disseminating the results of social science surveys. In general, survey data are typically interpreted by researchers and communicated with static reports and figures. Members of iUTAH’s social science and cyberinfrastructure teams wanted to expand this approach and develop an interactive, web-based tool that would make the data available to a wider audience. Innovations in methodology, tools, and approach are featured in the October 2016 edition of the journal Environmental Modelling and Software. 

Doug Jackson-Smith, Courtney Flint, and a number of other iUTAH social scientists conducted surveys assessing public attitudes toward water resources in Utah. As the project progressed, a tool was needed to help people visualize and access the results. Amber Jones and Jeff Horsburgh of iUTAH’s cyberinfrastructure team became involved to determine the essential components of the tool. Code was then written by Mauriel Ramirez to create and implement the viewer.

“Most of my past experience has been working with biophysical data,” said Amber Jones, iUTAH data manager and research engineer at Utah State University. “It has been rewarding to work with social scientists and learn about survey data.” The result of this partnership is the survey data viewer, a website that allows direct access to the responses of the 6,000 adults who participated in the iUTAH Utah Water Survey. Questions range from attitudes about local water quality to concerns about environmental conditions. The results can be grouped by home ownership, age, or education level.

“The survey data viewer makes social science data accessible to anyone, and it is interesting to explore patterns in Utahns’ responses,” said Jones. “This collaboration and development wouldn’t have been possible without iUTAH.” Currently, the cyberinfrastructure team is working to apply the tool to additional surveys. This provides a simple interface to communicate the results of surveys to stakeholders, participants, and the general public. One example of how an iUTAH survey is being visualized with the interface and is serving the community can be found here.

Authors of the article include Amber Jones, Jeff Horsburgh, Doug Jackson-Smith, Mauriel Ramirez, Courtney Flint, and Juan Caraballo. The article can be viewed in its entirety under the title A Web-Based, Interactive Visualization Tool For Social Environmental Survey Data.

iUTAH’s Gradients Along Mountain to Urban Transitions (GAMUT) can be found among the Global Network of Mountain Observatories (GNOMO). GNOMO’s mission is to bring together “teams of researchers, covering the range of pertinent disciplines, work together in a finite number of sites representative of the diversity of mountain regions around the world to develop their understanding of the current structure and function as well as the longer-term evolution, of mountain social-ecological systems using protocols that support comparative analysis, at a detail sufficient to support forecasts of likely outcome, given sufficiently defined boundary conditions, and in ways that engage a wide range of actors and contribute significantly to public and private decision-making.”

More information…

 

Good news in 2016! iUTAH researchers have been busy generating datasets, and the iUTAH data repository is growing. To publish your dataset (and even have it featured here), deposit it in the repository, and contact the iUTAH Data Manager Amber Jones.

And, don’t forget that datasets are reportable items in ER-Core (aka Drupal). We encourage you to publish and report your datasets to get credit for your work and results. Some of the latest submissions are listed below:

Water Manager Interviews and Survey

Andrea Armstrong conducted surveys and interviews with water managers from a variety of municipalities, irrigation companies, and the private sector. She has published the following datasets representing research conducted during her three years as an iUTAH graduate research assistant.

• Final Report: Armstrong 2013 Exploratory Interviews of Water Managers (2015)
  Final Report summarizing exploratory interviews of local water managers in the Wasatch Regional Metropolitan Area, specifically Cache Valley, Heber Valley, and the Red Butte Watershed of Salt Lake City, UT. 
• Armstrong 2014 Final Report Stormwater Manager Interviews (2015)
  This report summarizes interviews of stormwater managers throughout Utah and includes preliminary analyses.
• Survey of Stormwater Managers in Utah (2015)
  An effort in partnership with the Utah Storm Water Advisory Committee surveyed stormwater managers throughout Utah regarding attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors surrounding stormwater management. This dataset contains the anonymized survey results as well as a summary report.
• Utah Municipalities Stormwater Annual Reports (2015)
  This dataset includes a compliation of stormwater organizations’ annual reports and tables used to code these reports to track longitudinal changes in stormwater programs.

Aspens in central Utah, 2007 
Photo credit: Philkon Phil Konstantin

Dataset: Sapflux in GAMUT Watersheds. Allison Chan and Dave Bowling have collected and published sapflux data for aspen and fir from sites in the Logan River and Red Butte Creek watersheds. The datasets contain raw and processed sapflux data as well as meteorological and soil temperature and moisture measurements. Learn more at:

 

• T.W. Daniels Sapflux Subalpine Fir (24 March 2014 - 12 July 2015)
• T.W. Daniels Sapflux Aspen (13 May 2014 - 12 July 2015)
• Knowlton Fork Sapflux (through 5 July 2015)