The Task

Our brief for day 1 was simple - download the data from section 5 of this Gov.uk web page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/salmonid-and-freshwater-fisheries-statistics-2019/salmonid-and-fisheries-statistics-for-england-and-wales-2019#river-catch-summaries-by-area and build a dashboard from the data! Due to the fact this data was all about locations where these fish were caught, naturally spatial data would be an add on, so this is a bonus if we can utilise that data.

The Data

The data itself was catches of various types of fish in various locations of the UK in 2019. I decided to take a focus on Salmon, so I isolated those tables and started the data prep. It was a fairly simple workflow in Alteryx, some of the titles were tricky to rearrange as it was more an excel file type of style that it was formatted in. The data was split into whether the salmon had been caught by a rod or by a net so I handled these tables separately. See below an example of one of the workflows.

Once all the data was clean I gave it a test run in Tableau to make sure it was all working as expected. I combined the two tables in Tableau via a relationship which was joined on the Area. I also decided at this point to give the spatial data a go because I thought it would help bring more context to the dashboard insights. For this I just searched UK river spatial data and a few files came up that were free to download from Gov.uk website. Once I found one that looked promising I tried to see if it would join onto my salmon data via the river name. I didn't have a huge amount of luck doing this as sometimes the names would be 'River Dee' comparing to 'Dee' and so with the tight time constraint I decided to do a Find Replace because I know with this tool, you can find the word in just part of the cell. Once I tried this, I had a little bit more luck and some of the rivers matched! I was keen to get started on the dashboard so I went ahead with the data I had.

The Dashboard

This may have been one of the toughest dashboards I've created so far at the Data School. I definitely struggled with inspiration for what I could show or the insights I was trying to draw out. After 3 attempts of building a dashboard I stuck with my final design. I thought I'd take the insights back to basics and answer questions such as 'what is the most successful method of fishing' and then build some charts out from there. I included a map for some extra context but admittedly the data join was a bit of a fail... all in all I've learnt to manage my time a lot better and planning goes a long way! My final dashboard is on my Tableau Public page: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/frankie.benson