The mortality of West Indian Manatees (Trichechus manatus) has been a concern since 1972 when manatees were listed as endangered. As a result, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and teams of partnering biologists began to collect data revolving the mortality of manatees throughout Florida in 1974 (“Fish and Wildlife”). Deaths of manatees by watercraft collision has accounted for over 20% of the deaths of manatees from 1974 to 2015. Examining relationships between the anatomy of manatees, their size and sex, and the environment surrounding the manatee, such as season or region, can help to bring call to factors worth looking into further surrounding the unfortunate frequency in human related deaths for the West Indian manatee. The data taken from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is used in this analysis. The explanatory variables focused on in this study are the size of deceased manatees, the sex of the manatee, the region that the manatees are found in, and the season when the manatee was found. In order to explore a potential relationship a Generalized Linear Modeling approach was used to determine any relationship between the explanatory variables and the occurrence of Watercraft collision deaths in manatees. A Nonmetric Multidimensional Scaling(NMDS) analysis was used to help visualize potential differences between groupings of manatees that died from collision and those that didn’t. The results of the Generalized Linear Modeling analyses showed that there were not any independent significant relationships of size, sex, region, and season with the occurrence of watercraft collision death in the West Indian Manatee. The NMDS analyses resulted in visualizations that suggested that there is not much evidence of a difference between manatees that die from collision and those that do not.
The Report Detailing everything I did here and my findings can be found here: https://github.com/corpulentgowk/Data-Manipulation-in-R/blob/master/finalPaper_Layne.pdf
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