Yaak & Kootenai Water Quality Initiative Data Analysis (2021-2024)

This work was conducted as part of a one semester Montana State University undergraduate research course, led by Dr. Adam Sigler with support from Gabrielle Jawer. Noah Barbery was the undergraduate student assigned to the Stillwater program for the course. 

This work was conducted in consultation with the Yaak Valley Forest Council representative Anthony South.

Fall 2025 was the second year of this pilot course, with the intention to produce useful data summaries for volunteer monitoring programs while simultaneously providing hands on student learning opportunities.  

This work is supported by funding from Montana Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ). 

Report

Final report available here.

Student presentation

Link to student presentation pending feedback from collaborators

Tutorial on how to interpret boxplots

The report and student presentation include multiple boxplot visualizations. Linked here is a tutorial on how to read and interpret boxplots.

YVFC Data Hub upload

Included here is a link to the Yaak Valley Forest Council data on MSUEWQ's data hub. (Note: This link takes you to a boxplot view of total nitrogen for all sites and years. The sites, axes, date range, and plot type are interacive and can be changed to explore the data.)

Map of sampling sites

Included here is an interactive map of YVFC sampling sites.

Excel data files

Included here are the various data files and excel workflows used in this analysis. 

R Scripts

Included here is the R script used to tranform YVFC's data downloaded from the national Water Quality eXchange (WXQ) to cross-tab format.