Integration of R Statistical Environment into ICT Infrastructure of GMP and GENASIS

Overview & Synopsis

The Global Monitoring Plan (GMP) was established as a tool for providing a worldwide overview of Stockholm Convention (SC) compliance by monitoring and evaluation of SC 22 persistent organic pollutants (POPs) concentration levels and their trends. In order to evaluate a dataset on POPs concentrations from the initial GMP campaign, it was essential to use advanced statistical methods which are not incorporated in commonly used database languages. Instead of a complete realization of these methods in the main programming language, in which the application is developed, this language was used only as an interface to the server version of the powerful statistical software R. The involvement of the R language into the environmental pollution data assessment infrastructure of the Global Environmental Assessment Information System (GENASIS) adopted for the GMP data makes easier to avoid disambiguities in data analysis and brings a powerful tool for advanced statistical analysis and visualization of GMP and GENASIS data.