SharkPulse App

This project is an extension of work that has been done in previous years on the sharkPulse website. sharkPulse was created due to the escalating exploitation of shark species and the difficulty of classifying shark sightings. Due to sharks’ low population dynamics, exploitation has only exacerbated the issue and made sharks the most endangered group of marine animals.

sharkPulse retrieves sightings from several sources such as Flickr, Instagram, and user submissions to generate shark population data. The website utilizes WordPress , HTML, and CSS for the front end and R-Shiny, PostgreSQL, and PHP to connect the website to the back end database. The team was tasked with improving the general usability of the site by integrating dynamic data-informed visualizations. The major clients of the project are Assistant Professor Franceso Ferreti from the Virginia Tech Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation and Graduate Research Assistant Jeremy Jenrette.

The team established regular contact through Slack, scheduled weekly meetings online with both clients, and acquired access to all major code repositories and relevant databases. The team was tasked with creating dynamic and data-informed visualizations, general UI/UX improvements, and stretch goals for improving miscellaneous pages throughout the site. The team developed PHP scripts to model a variety of statistics by dynamically querying the database. These scripts were then sourced directly through the site via the Elementor WordPress module.

All original requirements from the clients have been met as well as some stretch goals established later in the semester. The team created a Leaflet global network map of affiliate links which dynamically sourced the sharkPulse social network groups from an Excel spreadsheet and generated country border markers and links to each country’s social network sites as well as a Taxonomic Accuracy Table for the Shark Detector AI. The team created and distributed a survey form to collect user feedback on the general usability of the site which was compiled and sent to the client for future work.