By: Kade Cralle & Joseph Williams U.S. Shark Attacks (1984-2012)

Introduction Sharks attacks have been recorded and depicted in history since the dawn of man and has fascinated the human race for centuries. Our project will depict the data of all recorded shark attacks and the injuries these sharks inflicted on their victims from 1984 to 2012. The Data we have collected contains the sharks species’, location of the attack in latitude and longitude, name and sex of the victims, the injury inflicted on the victim, and the date and time of day of the attack. Using this Point data we plan to create three maps querying and cliping data to depict the differences in sex of the victims and identify clustered areas of attacks.

Map 1 Map 1 is a heat map that shows where the most shark attacks occured throughout the United States of America. This is useful for any ocean swimmers because one can see where the safest spots to swim in the USA are. We have identified the southern eastern and western coasts of the U.S. to be the most dangerous areas for swimmers and divers. We also found anomalies where shark attacks occured on land in aquariums. We adjusted the data to not include this data in our heat map as it would skew and inaccurately present the data.

Map 2 Using symbology to identify each shark with a different color. This will allow us to learn more about each individual sharks drawing from the injury type data we have recovered to identify the most dangerous sharks and their habits. This will also help us determine which states different species of sharks like migrate around. We identified Florida as the state with the highest concentration of attacks and further identified the attacks by depicting the shark species of each attack. We found the sheer amount of different species within the small area astounding.

Map 3 For our third map we clipped the area area with the highest concentration of attacks from our heat map and used point data to further examine the effects that each attack had on their victims. Changing the symbology using point data we were able to determine the effects these attacks had on their victims. Most attacks occurred on the east coast of florida as oppose the west coast in the Gulf of Mexico. The majority of the victims survived with injuries. Very few attacks were fatal. However there were more fatal attacks then there were attacks which the victim survived without injury.

Methods and Workflow In order to make these three maps, we downloaded layers from arcgis.com. We then used them on ArcMap 10.5.1. We used the arctoolbox to utilize the kernel density tool in order to create a density map. We then used 120 mile buffer around the United States to clip and limit the amount of data in our final product. Then using the attribute table we selected features to manipulate by editing the symbology to depict the different shark species and fatality rates of the attacks.

Citation Injury Type- ArcGis.com Shark Species- ArcGis.com

Kade Cralle- Herndon High School Joey Williams- Herndon High School Credits Kade Cralle- Herndon High School Joey Williams- Herndon High School