Modeling sociodemographic factors near coal-fired power plants

Introduction

Source code for the paper:

Dai, M. Q., Geyman, B. M., Hu, X. C., Thackray, C. P., & Sunderland E. M. (2023). Sociodemographic Disparities in Mercury Exposure from United States Coal-Fired Power Plants. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 10(7), 589-595. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00216

Authors

• Mona Q. Dai
• Benjamin Geyman
• Xindi Hu
• Colin Thackray
• Elsie M. Sunderland

Order and purpose of scripts

Main Scripts

• 1_PP_vulnerable_buffer.Rmd: Explore whether the proportion of potentially vulnerable groups within
  buffers surrounding power plants change at differing buffer sizes.

• 2_PP_active_retire.Rmd : Explore whether the proportion of potentially vulnerable groups within the buffers surrounding power plants that are still active differ from those that have been retired since 2010.

• 3_Hg_deposition.Rmd : Evaluate spatial clustering of Hg deposition & sociodemographic factors across the US.

Supporting Scripts

• census2020.R: Load & organize 2010 & 2020 US Census data from NHGIS.

• LoadCensus.R: Organize US Census data into vulnerable subgroups for central estimates & margin of error (MOE) vlaues.

Functions

• f_census.R : Group US Census data by vulnerable subgroups.

• f_LoadNHGIS.R: Load US Census data from NHGIS.

• f_spatial.R : Apply spatial regression models.

• f_Misc.R : Other functions to read & clean data, calculate statistics (margin of error [MOE], confidence interval [CI], etc.), plotting, statistical significance tests

Necessary packages

• tidyverse
• tidycensus
• foreign
• cowplot
• spatstat
• sf
• terra
• rsample
• lmtest
• raster
• ncdf4
• stars
• spatialreg
• spdep

Data

All data files can be found on Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/9X5GEH).

Download all files to the "data" directory to run the above scripts.

US Census data files downloaded from NHGIS (https://www.nhgis.org/): [tag: nhgis]

• nhgis0055_ds176_20105_blck_grp.csv, _codebook.txt : US Census block group sociodemographic factors & codebook for 2006-2010.
• nhgis0039_ds249_20205_blck_grp.csv, _codebook.txt : US Census block group sociodemographic factors & codebook for 2016-2020.
• US_blck_grp_2010.shp : US Census block group polygons for 2006-2010.
• US_blck_grp_2020.shp : US Census block group polygons for 2016-2020.
• States_shapefile.shp : US state polygons.

Simulated Hg deposition data from GEOS-Chem: [tag: deposition]

• Total_2010.nc : Hg deposition from all sources for 2010.
• Total_2020.nc : Hg deposition from all sources for 2020.
• EGU_2010.nc : Hg deposition from US electric generating units (EGUs) only in 2010.
• EGU_2020.nc : Hg deposition from US electric generating units (EGUs) only in 2020.

Power plant & US census related data files: [tag: plant_census]

• facility_gisjoin5.dbf : List of overlapping 2010 coal-fired power plant IDs & US Census block group IDs within 5km.
• facility2020_retire_0123.csv : List of coal-fired power plants & retirement status.
• facility2020_pt.shp : Locations of coal-fired power plants as points.
• vulnerable20_tot.RDS : Counts of 2020 vulnerable subgroups by census block group.
• us_vulnerable2020.shp : Proportion of 2020 vulnerable subgroups by census block group as polygons.