Description

In this Swirl lesson, we use publicly available data collected by USGS to explore patterns of hydrology in Nebraska streams with the R package 'dataRetrieval' (De Cicco, L.A., Hirsch, R.M., Lorenz, D., Watkins, W.D., 2018, dataRetrieval: R packages for discovering and retrieving water data available from Federal hydrologic web services, doi:10.5066/P9X4L3GE). The lesson provides a framework for students to access USGS data, and then visualize the data in R for graphical analysis. This is a lesson that could occur during or after a lab, lecture or discussion that introduces streamflow and effects of human activities in watersheds on river flow regimes (e.g., urbanization, dams, climate change). A complementary Swirl lesson or other pre-lesson module that introduces R basics (vectors, data frames), and ggplot2 would be beneficial.

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