DC Cherry Blossoms

Diana Chiang

2024-09-08

The National Cherry Blossom Festival in an annual spring celebration in Washington, D.C. that sees visitors from all over the country and even the world. In 2024, an estimated 1.6 million people attended the event. This report explores the trend of when the cherry blossoms reach peak bloom through the years. Enjoy!

Importing the data

library(readr)
cherryblossoms <- read_csv("cherry-blossoms.csv")
## Rows: 102 Columns: 2
## ── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
## Delimiter: ","
## dbl (2): Year, Peak_Bloom
## 
## ℹ Use `spec()` to retrieve the full column specification for this data.
## ℹ Specify the column types or set `show_col_types = FALSE` to quiet this message.
cherryblossoms
## # A tibble: 102 × 2
##     Year Peak_Bloom
##    <dbl>      <dbl>
##  1  1921         79
##  2  1922         97
##  3  1923         99
##  4  1924        104
##  5  1925         86
##  6  1926        101
##  7  1927         79
##  8  1928         99
##  9  1929         90
## 10  1930         91
## # ℹ 92 more rows
#The number in the Peak_Bloom column is the number of days from January 1.

Summary Statistics

paste("The mean number of days to reach peak bloom is", round(mean(cherryblossoms$Peak_Bloom), 1), "days from January 1.")
## [1] "The mean number of days to reach peak bloom is 93.5 days from January 1."
paste("The median number of days to reach peak bloom is", round(median(cherryblossoms$Peak_Bloom), 1),"days from January 1.")
## [1] "The median number of days to reach peak bloom is 94.5 days from January 1."
paste("The correlation between the year and the number of days to reach peak bloom is", round(cor(cherryblossoms$Year, cherryblossoms$Peak_Bloom), 1), ".")
## [1] "The correlation between the year and the number of days to reach peak bloom is -0.3 ."
paste("This means the number of days to reach peak bloom has decreased over the years.")
## [1] "This means the number of days to reach peak bloom has decreased over the years."
summary(cherryblossoms$Peak_Bloom)
##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##   74.00   88.25   94.50   93.51   99.00  108.00

Scatterplot

plot(x=cherryblossoms$Year, y=cherryblossoms$Peak_Bloom, type="p", xlab="Year", ylab="Days", main="Days to Reach Peak Bloom", frame.plot=FALSE)