EFI-USGS River Chlorophyll Forecast Challenge

tl;dr: Forecast the targets!

The “targets” are time-series of United States Geological Survey (USGS) data for use in model development and forecast evaluation.

The targets are updated as new USGS data are made available.

This challenge focuses on forecasting river chlorophyll-a at select USGS monitoring locations. The links to targets files are included below.

Where to start

As you develop your forecasting skills and want to expand to more sites, the targets are available at all 10 USGS sites. You may also consider submitting forecasts to sites that match your interests or locality.

More information about USGS sites can be found in the site metadata and on USGS’s website

Explore the targets and themes

Information on the targets files for the river chlorophyll challenge is below. In the tables,

“duration” is the time-step of the variable where P1D is a daily mean.
The “forecast horizon” is the number of days-ahead that we want you to forecast.
The “latency” is the time between data collection and data availability in the targets file

River Chlorophyll

The river chlorophyll challenge invites you to forecast daily mean chlorophyll at up to 10 USGS river sites.

variable	duration	Description	horizon	Latency
chla	P1D	daily mean Chlorophyll-a (ug/L)	30 days	~ 0 days

The daily mean target file is located at the following URL.

url <- "https://sdsc.osn.xsede.org/bio230014-bucket01/challenges/targets/project_id=usgsrc4cast/duration=P1D/river-chl-targets.csv.gz"

You can directly load it into memory for R

aquatics_targets <- readr::read_csv(url, show_col_types = FALSE)

or python

import pandas as pd

url = "https://sdsc.osn.xsede.org/bio230014-bucket01/challenges/targets/project_id=usgsrc4cast/duration=P1D/river-chl-targets.csv.gz"
aquatics_targets = pd.read_csv(url)

The file contains the following columns

project_id	site_id	datetime	duration	variable	observation
usgsrc4cast	USGS-01427510	2019-12-19	P1D	chla	1.647619
usgsrc4cast	USGS-01427510	2019-12-20	P1D	chla	1.826146
usgsrc4cast	USGS-01427510	2019-12-21	P1D	chla	1.806210
usgsrc4cast	USGS-01427510	2019-12-22	P1D	chla	1.806771
usgsrc4cast	USGS-01427510	2019-12-23	P1D	chla	1.746250
usgsrc4cast	USGS-01427510	2019-12-24	P1D	chla	1.777604

and the time series for the focal sites

aquatics_targets |> 
  filter(site_id %in% aquatics_focal_sites) |> 
  ggplot(aes(x = datetime, y = observation)) +
  geom_point() +
  facet_wrap(~site_id, scales = "free") +
  theme_bw() + 
  ylab("Chlorophyll-a (ug/L)")

Explore the sites

The following table lists all the sites in the EFI-USGS Ecological Forecasting Challenge. The columns with “theme” names incidate whether that site is included in that theme’s target file.

site_id	site_no	station_nm	site_url
USGS-14211720	14211720	WILLAMETTE RIVER AT PORTLAND, OR	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/14211720
USGS-14211010	14211010	CLACKAMAS RIVER NEAR OREGON CITY, OR	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/14211010
USGS-14181500	14181500	NORTH SANTIAM RIVER AT NIAGARA, OR	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/14181500
USGS-05586300	05586300	ILLINOIS RIVER AT FLORENCE, IL	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/05586300
USGS-05558300	05558300	ILLINOIS RIVER AT HENRY, IL	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/05558300
USGS-05553700	05553700	ILLINOIS RIVER AT STARVED ROCK, IL	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/05553700
USGS-05543010	05543010	ILLINOIS RIVER AT SENECA, IL	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/05543010
USGS-05549500	05549500	FOX RIVER NEAR MCHENRY, IL	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/05549500
USGS-01427510	01427510	DELAWARE RIVER AT CALLICOON NY	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/01427510
USGS-01463500	01463500	Delaware River at Trenton NJ	https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/01463500