Explore historical and geographical trends in big game hunting.
Personal project under development.
This interactive app visualizes historical hunting data in B.C., Canada, for selected wildlife management units, selected hunting regions, or province-wide.
My main goals for the project are to learn about historical and regional trends in big game populations, and how they relate to hunting limits set by the provincial government. A second goal is to gain experience working with government data sets. And, I want to improve my skills in:
- data manipulation with dplyr/tidyverse
- combining data sets from different sources
- visualizing geographic data
- interactive data visualization
- RShiny app development
Run BC-big-game-harvest/app.R to build the app and show interactive options.
- Don't allow selection of hunting regions 7A and/or 7B in combination with region 7
- Edit additional plots of timeseries data to show relevant info
- Separate resident and non-resident hunters and their kills
- Incorporate hunting licence sales
- Consider adding fishing data?
- Use single legend
- Add map to select regions graphically
- Add tab with regional differences for a given year
- Improve aesthetics of layout
- Streamline code
- Fix axis padding to be based off max tick label rather than max value
- Fix sporadic problem where some Inf values are not plotting as 0
I used the following publicly-available data sets from the B.C. provincial government:
- Hunting kills (1976--2018): [overview] [xlsx]
- I used the xlsx version of the dataset rather than the csv version, because the csv had half the header text cut off and does not have descriptions of field codes
- There is a Shiny app for this data (which I didn't know about when starting mine) at https://kootenaywildlife.shinyapps.io/BCHarvestData_2018/ and an up-to-date version at https://kootenaywildlife.shinyapps.io/BCHarvestData/. However it limits some regional analyses to the Kootenay region.
- Annual population of BC (1867--2019): [overview] [csv]
- Hunting licence sales (2005--2020): [overview] [csv]
- Haven't incorporated this yet, but will use the csv version because the data is formatted in a friendlier way for analysis
- B.C. Wildlife management units: [overview and link to custom download]
- I selected the entire province and chose geoJSON format
There is some really interesting (although a bit outdated) background information on how hunting quotas are set in the 2007--2011 Kootenay Wildlife Harvest Advisory Committee meeting minutes.
Created by Heather More