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Data visualizations

These power plants are Colorado's biggest greenhouse gas emitters. Here's where they stand

Publication: The Coloradoan

Brief: Over the past decade, the 10 largest emitters in Colorado contributed to an outsized share of greenhouse gasses — and every single one is a fossil fuel power plant. While the parent companies that own them are driving the state's reductions, it might still not be enough for the state to reach its climate goals.

What I used: R coding (GitHub), Flourish

How healthy is the South Platte River Basin snowpack? See how it compares to past years

Publication: The Coloradoan

Brief: Inspired by a story from LA Times’s Sean Greene that featured a graphic showing the Sierra snowpack as it reaches its peak, we took at look at the snow conditions in our own region.

What I used: R coding

snowpack_south_platte.png

Colorado's 20 largest wildfires happened this century. Here's how things are changing

Publication: The Coloradoan

Brief: In Colorado, the top 20 largest wildfires happened this century, and four of the five largest wildfires happened since 2018. A combination of increasing temperatures fueled by climate change, historic over-suppression of fires, and more people moving into fire-prone areas are making this risk harder to manage.

What I used: R coding, Affinity Designer

biggest_wildfires_clean.png

Chicago’s one-star nursing homes were troubled before the pandemic. Now, they’re ‘ground zero’ 

Publication: The Columbia Chronicle

Brief: In a first-of-its-kind analysis, we scraped data from several sources to examine how nursing home residents were being impacted at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that not only was there a disproportionate number of cases and deaths in these facilities, but the ratio of COVID-19 deaths per facility was the highest at at low star facilities (oftentimes found on disadvantaged neighborhoods) on the federal ranking. 

What I used: web scraping, Google Sheets, Flourish

From farms to cities: Analysis shows Colorado-Big Thompson water right ownership changes 

Publication: The Coloradoan

Brief: We compiled our own dataset on water transfers in northeast Colorado using public records to quantify a trend: We found that since June 2019, around 95% of water shares that were transferred went from farms (class D contracts) to municipalities (class B) and water districts (class C).

What I used: R coding (GitHub), Google Sheets, Flourish, Infogram

‘It affects all of us’: Larimer County CCAP enrollment expected to remain on a freeze

Publication: The Coloradoan

Brief: Months prior, we had reported on how the county froze enrollment for its child care assistance program, citing insufficient funding. After our interviews with county staff were denied, we filed an open records request to get financial documents and talked to sources from several counties and the state to better understand how others managed similar situations. An alternative discussed was the state's reallocation program, where at the end of a fiscal year, unused funds from county's are given to the ones that overspent their budget, as illustrated below.

What I used: R coding, Google Sheets

CCAP_closeout.png
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