You are here:
Advanced Decision-Support for Coastal Beach Health: Virtual Beach 3.0
Citation:
Cyterski, Mike, K. Wolfe, M. Galvin, W. Brooks, S. Corsi, T. Roddick, A. Mednick, AND D. Rockwell. Advanced Decision-Support for Coastal Beach Health: Virtual Beach 3.0. Presented at 56th Annual Conference on Great Lakes Research, West Lafayette, IN, June 02 - 06, 2013.
Impact/Purpose:
Presented at the Annual Conference of the International Association of Great Lakes Research. June 2-6, 2013. West Lafayette, IN
Description:
Virtual Beach is a free decision-support system designed to help beach managers and researchers construct, evaluate, and operate site-specific statistical models that can predict levels of fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) based on environmental conditions that are more readily measured, estimated, or forecast. Since its first operational use in 2009, Virtual Beach has been updated several times based on feedback from users in the field. These updates have improved the efficiency of the model-building and evaluation process and made the process of operating a predictive model faster and more user-friendly. Virtual Beach 3.0 includes significant enhancements, including new statistical methods and the integration of hydro-meteorological data accessed through the Web-based Environmental Data Discovery and Transformation (EnDDaT) system. New statistical methods include partial least squares (PLS) regression and gradient boosted modeling (GBM), which provide alternatives to the standard multiple-linear 67 2013regression (MLR) approach, optimized using a genetic algorithm. This poster will illustrate the functionalities of the enhanced software and highlight applications in the Great Lakes.
