Student Data Visualization Contest | Love Data Week 2025

These maps show the urban expansion of Orleans Parish across fifty-year periods, starting with the original French settlement of Nouvelle Orleans three hundred years ago. The maps demonstrate how natural movement of the Mississippi River allowed urban growth onto the batture below Tchoupitoulas St., the gradual expansion of the canal network for drainage and navigation, and construction of the modern pump system spurred the rapid expansion of the urban footprint.

This project hopes to understand where in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana is most likely to flood due to rainfall. This is important because the area is likely to flood, since it receives over 60 inches of rainfall each year and contains a large number of streams and rivers.

Over the course of this study, monthly samples were collected from 9 recreational sites on
Lake Pontchartrain. Vibrio concentrations were collected as well as the presence or absence of 3 species of concern, Vibrio cholerae, Vibrio vulnificus, and Vibrio parahaemolyticus.

This figure shows how scientists use a modern approach called network pharmacology to study how traditional Chinese herbal medicine can help treat Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The key idea is to find connections between the genes involved in AD and the compounds in herbal medicine that could interact with them. The software Cytoscape (version 3.7.2) was used to visualize and analyze the connections between herb, molecules and targets.

In April 2023, FEMA implemented Risk Rating 2.0, the new price rating formula of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), causing flood insurance rates to skyrocket across the country. On the front lines of climate change and coastal erosion, Louisiana is being dramatically impacted by these changes. The goal of this analysis is to understand the key demographic characteristics (race/ethnicity and income/poverty) of ZIP codes in Louisiana that will experience significant price hikes to their flood insurance policies from an environmental justice perspective, which understands that people of color and low-income communities experience disproportionate environmental stressors.

This study investigates how the pandemic affected the mental health of high school students. In 2021, a survey of 107 students from a high school in the Midwest United States was conducted. By focusing on this age group, the study’s goal is to explore their vulnerabilities, resilience, and the broader implications for mental health support.

Using QGIS software, this research aims to create evacuation route maps from high-risk areas to the nearest designated safe zones, alongside an earthquake hazard map. In accordance with international standards outlined by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, 2007), the 20-km(13-mile) radius surrounding the NPP is designated as the Danger Zone, and the area between the 20-km buffer (Danger Zone) and the 100-km buffer is classified as the Safe Zone. The evacuation maps will identify the shortest transportation routes from danger zone towns to the nearest safe zones. Additionally, a second set of maps will depict earthquakes of magnitude 5 and above since 1915, as well as a heatmap of earthquake activity.

When the lowermost reach of the Mississippi River drops below 300,000 cubic feer per second (cfs), the salt water from the Gulf of Mexico begins to propagate upstream. Due to its higher density, the saltwater forms a wedge that travels up the river channel. The saltwater wedge threatens wildlife, vegetation, and drinking water. The Army Corps of Engineers monitors the river drought, and if necessary, they build a sill of sediment to slow the progression of the wedge before the drinking water of New Orleans is contaminated.

TBI rats were generated using controlled cortical impact. A portion of the cortex from each sample was obtained and nuclei from the tissue was isolated and then sequenced using 10x Genomics Chromium. Outputs were loaded into R and quality control and clustering was performed using Seurat and SCTransform.

The Ike Dike is a proposed 17-mile long, $57 billion dollar storm surge barrier that is slated for construction
on Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula. If constructed, it will be one of the world’s most expensive infrastructure projects. A large percentage of the cost would be paid by local taxpayers, as the project is advertised to “protect the entire Houston-Galveston region” from hurricane storm surges.

This figure shows the growth of three wetland plants in recycled glass sand compared to dredged river sand. Most coastal land building projects in Louisiana use dredged river sand, but this is a limited resource. Meanwhile, tons of glass head to the landfill each year. Crushing that glass into sand and using it in coastal restoration projects would be a win-win. By showing that wetland plants grow just as well in a mix of glass sand and dredged sand as they do in dredged sand alone, we demonstrated that using glass sand in coastal restoration is both possible and promising.

These images are segments of a body of visual artwork responding to the U.S. Supreme Court Case, U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). The opinion of this SCOTUS case was written by Justice George Sutherland. In his opinion, Justice Sutherland asked, “is a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood, born in Amritsar, Punjab, India, a white person within the meaning of Rev. Stats 2169?