Our project is about the ongoing “War on Rats” in New York City.
Rats are known transmitters of illnesses like salmonellosis, E.coli, and Leptospirosis. When they’re so close to us, it’s possible for us to contract these sicknesses through physical contact, bites, or airborne particles from their waste. To combat this, in 2022, Mayor Eric Adams rolled out a series of initiatives that would clean up New York and encourage cleaner waste disposal among businesses and citizens.
The goal of this project was to investigate how successful these initiatives have been in combatting the rising number of rodent residents in NYC. Based on our personal experience living here and anecdotes from others, we hypothesized that the initiatives were not effective.
To test this, we used Python’s Matplotlib library to visualize the NYC Open Data and iNaturalist data on brown rat sightings from 2020 to 2025. We decided to use this method so that we could verify how much progress was being made, if any.
After compiling the data, our results showed that there was a 30% decrease in rat sightings after the start of the War on Rats which suggests that the initiatives were very successful and the most population dense boroughs saw the greatest decrease.
