Effect of Oil Spill on Birds: A Graphical Assay of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill's Impact on Birds

• Activity Number: 251
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Graphics
• Author(s): Aida Yazdanparast*+ and Tony Tran
• Companies: California State University at East Bay and California State University at East Bay
• Keywords: 2011 ASA Data Exposition ; Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill ; Cloud Computing ; Google Fusion Tables ; Tableau ; Birds

Abstract

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was an ecologically devastating event in the Gulf of Mexico, which saw the estimated release of over 4 million barrels of oil after flowing for three months in 2010. The US Fish and Wildlife Service provided a data set of 7, 229 bird records. In our poster, we aimed to illustrate the important features of the data set utilizing a blend of analytics and graphics executed through traditional and cloud-based software. It is concluded from the graphs that the areas containing the greatest concentration of birds were nearest to the coasts adjacent to New Orleans and the Deepwater platform. Moreover, although the Laughing Gull and Brown Pelican had the highest frequency of deaths, the result of logistic regression showed that Unidentified Gull, Unidentified Pelican, and Unidentified Tern have the highest probability of being found dead. Furthermore, additional investigation into the morbidity impact on birds over time indicates a lagging effect. A similar lag is present in the oiling of the birds where a separate time series shows the oiled/not visibly oiled birds alternating in frequency over the collection period.