Link to Infographic: https://olibeeby.wixsite.com/biodiversity-and-can

By: Kay Snell and Oli Beeby

Objective:

Our information visualization uses historic trends in Canadian bird populations as a jumping off point to explore the ongoing climate crisis. Our infographic highlights how humanity’s impact on the environment not only grows year to year, but poses a critical threat to our nation’s wildlife. Bird populations feel the effects of this environmental devastation for years after events occur and thus serve as useful indicator species.

Climate change, amongst other crises addressed in our infographic pose existential threats to life on earth which when poorly communicated, rather than motivating individuals to call for change, cause paralyzation. It was our goal in this infographic to communicate the catastrophic crisis of the ongoing 6th Mass Extinction event in a way that felt tangible and immediate — which led to the decision to make a visually-appealing infographic that focuses on birds — a familiar subject for our audience. We designed our infographic as if it was for a popular science magazine to be received by a general Canadian public who may or may not already have interest in the concept of biodiversity loss, and therefore we needed to ensure there was a balance of quick to understand visuals you could get at a glance, and thorough text that gives a bigger picture. This approach aligned with our initial info visualization goals drawn from Munzner (2014) : to present our findings, allow viewers to explore our visualization, and to encourage them to compare and make connections between the different data we presented (p. 48).  It is our hope that through exploring this infographic viewers are left engaged and empowered rather than paralyzed.

 

Dataset Details:

Our project used the dataset for “Trends in Canada’s Bird Populations” from the Government of Canada as the foundation of our project.  We used this data because birds can be used as an indicator species to reveal threats to biodiversity and ecosystem health. To broaden our argument and tell a more compelling story, we utilized multiple datasets that further explore the environmental conditions affecting bird populations across Canada, such as data about sea level rise and pesticide usage. These datasets came packaged as csv files, but had to be cleaned for our purposes by removing the notes and non-applicable portions.

We produced a series of charts that used data from the National Forestry Database, using their dataset for forest fires and their dataset for pest-control product use. Both of these datasets showed data that had been collected over a number of years, and could thus be used to reflect trends that related to the “State of Canada’s Birds” data.

Additionally, we used data from the National Drought Mitigation Center to look at the area of land (in Canada) that had been affected by drought during the past twenty years and how severely it was impacted. This data was exported as a csv file which required minimal cleaning, however because the data was collected monthly it had to be averaged for an annual graph to be made.

We also brought in a csv dataset measuring historic sea level anomalies from 1993 to 2016 around the Canadian coast from the World Bank Group: Climate Change Knowledge Portal to show the impact of rising tides on the surrounding ecosystems.

Tableau Prep:

Originally, we used Tableau Prep to clean the data and find null values. However, we quickly ran into an issue when our Tableau Prep would not allow us to export as anything other than a Tableau Prep file. This made any cleaning we had done to the csv files unusable. Instead, we used Tableau Prep as a diagnostic tool and then made any changes to the dataset primarily in Excel.

Excel:

Excel is useful when processing csv files because it allows for columns to be easily deleted and marks to be replaced in the case of null values. Because we spent more time looking for datasets that were already in csv file format it required less time cleaning than if they were in another format.

Tableau:

When applicable, we would also use Tableau to hide the categories that were irrelevant for the charts we intended to make, then extract that data for a cleaned version that could be shared if needed. Additionally, it also highlighted issues in the data like null values and made it easy to remove/hide categories that were irrelevant. This was useful if we were still considering using the data and did not want to permanently delete it in the Excel file.

We primarily used Tableau as a way to test different versions of charts and explore possible representations of the data. Charts could be made in Tableau quickly and easily. We could then decide which charts would be used in the next stage and if they should be changed before then.  Another good part of Tableau is that the charts are easily alterable. However, because there is no (or if there is we could not find it,) way to export an image of a chart transparently it limited the possibilities for our final version.

Illustrator:

Illustrator provided a great deal of freedom in designing our infographic and integrating our info visualizations. While Illustrator allowed us to start our design from scratch and create it as we saw fit, it also meant InfoVis — once translated to illustrator from Tableau —  had to be hand drawn which required more time and thus made them less changeable which was a challenge. Alternatively, without access to Illustrator the illustrative elements of the infographic (the birds for each panel and the backgrounds throughout) would not have been possible.

 

Analytic Steps:

In the case of the forest fire and pest control datasets, the National Forestry Database had already used Tableau to visualize a graph for each. This provided a starting point when deciding how to design our own graphic. However, once we downloaded the data as csv files, we realized that there was much more to work with and many more possibilities to show this data visually. Tableau allowed us to easily experiment with different variations of the data before moving to Illustrator for a less alterable product.

In the case of our forest fire data, while we liked the use of hue to aesthetically represent magnitude in a singular line chart, this use of color became challenging to accurately transfer to Illustrator and potentially visually confusing for a magnitude channel. As a result, we ended up using the bar chart version which still employed the use of hue aesthetically to show more forest fires per year as darker. We then overlaid a white line chart that showed the number of hectares burned over the top of the bar chart for number of fires to ensure it popped out.

 

 

However, not all of the datasets we used had been previously turned into infovis, or if they had, not in a way that was applicable to us. While the North American drought monitor included a heat map of affected areas across a landscape, it did not show a representation of the dataset historically. We knew that we wanted to produce charts that showed data over a number of years and therefore processed that data accordingly.

In the case of our sea-level dataset, the World Bank Group had already used Tableau to represent this data; however, it was very difficult to understand and did not immediately appear to tell a story. We decided to simplify our chart to focus on one aspect of the rising tides to not overwhelm our audience. Instead, we focused solely on annual anomalies, which allowed us to show minute changes in the data much better and told our story more clearly.

Design Process and Principles:

After we turned the hard data we used for this project — both from the 2019 State of Canadian Birds report and the supplemental environmental data —into a series of graphs, these visualizations next needed to be incorporated into a story about mitigating the impacts of anthropogenic climate change (amongst other human-caused environmental threats). To tell this story, we adhered to Lankow et. al’s (2012) suggestions about prioritizing comprehension in academic and scientific design and in editorial design placing appeal at the forefront (p. 38). As our goal with this infographic was to translate environmental research and dense documents such as the IPCC reports into a narrative the general public could understand, taking simultaneously an academic and editorial (or public facing) approach seemed appropriate. Principles of appeal and comprehension inspired us to create our narrative infographic that takes the viewer on a journey across three Canadian landscapes and teaches about their accompanying under-threat bird populations. This “landscape” design began with a moodboard that included other science communication infographics but also children’s storybooks and classroom posters.

Moodboard

Sketch

Digital sketch of layout to determine topics and placement of copy, info visualizations, and illustrations.

Integrating our info visualizations into the final infographic was, of course, equally as important as writing copy from our research or drawing up illustrations for this project and this required implementing the design principles of expressiveness and effectiveness in each info visualization. We ensured for each infovis that the data types being encoded were paired with the appropriate channel — for example, the ordered quantitative data of hectares of land was paired with the magnitude channel of length in both the forest fire and pesticide usage visualizations — bearing in mind the principle of expressiveness. In each visualization we also took into consideration effectiveness, making sure the most important attributes were given the most salient channels — for example the unordered nominal data of “type of bird” in the “Trends in Canadian Bird Populations 1972- 2017” was given the salient identity channel of hue.

In both the infovis and the final infographic — as has already been alluded to — soundness, utility, and beauty were at the top of our mind as we worked through the project. Lankow et al. (2012) report that for an infographic to be “sound” it must tell a story that is meaningful to its audience with integrity (p. 200). It was our intent with this infographic to make the broad and somewhat intangible story of mass scale biodiversity loss into one our audience could relate to through both our choice of data (i.e. birds are easier to empathize with than the larger concept of biodiversity) and how we translated that data into our infographic. For example, we employed several bar graphs throughout as they make “it easy for the reader to understand what is going on” (Lankow et al., 2012, p. 213) which supported our goal of accurately and meaningfully communicating our narrative to our intended audience. As for utility, in the same vein, every infovis in our infographic uses a relatively straightforward to understand idiom — bar graphs, line charts, and stacked bar graphs are described as effective and viewer-friendly idioms by Lankow et. al. (2012, pp. 212-214). Finally, as previously mentioned, appeal, and thus beauty, were a high priority for us — as an editorial infographic, since we intended this project to appeal to the general public. We used cool tones of green and blue as these colours are associated with Earth and environmentalism (think: recycling bins being blue!). Nonetheless, none of our “beauty” choices detract from the utility of our infographic — in fact, we hope they enhance the usefulness of our graphic; for example, behind the main spread of this graphic is a wavy, low-opacity shape that looks a bit like wind or a cloud, which contributes to the landscape illustration while simultaneously acting as a guide line leading the viewer’s eyes through the entire infographic. This ethos was also taken into account with our infovis; for example, in our “Trends in Canadian Bird Populations” graph we chose to depart from how the data had been visualized previously in the 2019 report the data came from, and instead use reds and oranges for the birds in decline — both to visually group these categories and to associate them with ideas of planetary warming.

Pros and Cons of Our Designs:

The pros and cons of our design choices have already been discussed throughout this report but to summarize, our infographic was designed to tell a story about the large-scale environmental crisis our planet faces and to mobilize our audience to take action against the ongoing 6th great extinction event happening all around us. This goal informed our decision-making throughout the project and meant, for example, that while our final infographic is not especially useful for making new discoveries about the data we utilized, it does communicate its argument in a visually appealing, simple, and easily understandable manner. While we planned our infovis in Tableau, we chose to use illustrator to create our infographic as it allows for the best flexibility in terms of design. Illustrator allowed us to start from scratch and build our design as we saw fit, but this was a trade off and meant we had less flexibility to adjust the info visualizations we’d created as we worked. Furthermore, as we wanted to appeal to a broad audience, we had to ensure our text didn’t get too in the weeds with details — for example, we wrote that sea level anomaly is “when the current sea level trend differs significantly from the historical trend” rather than getting into the nitty gritty of how anomaly is calculated by physical oceanographers. Each of these tradeoffs was made ensuring that we were never “lying with charts”’ or obscuring the true story, while designing our infographic in the interest of supporting our chosen audience and goals.

Sources:

The Cornell Lab. (2022). All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/

Environment and Climate Change Canada (2019). Trends in Canada’s bird populations – Trends in bird populations by species group, Canada. 1970-2016 [Data set]. Government of Canada. https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/2d533032-3dc2-4302-b831-65e1bdcf78e7

Environment and Climate Change Canada. (2019). The State of Canada’s Birds. Gatineau, Quebec. http://nabci.net/wp-content/uploads/2019-State-of-Canadas-Birds-1.pdf

Fang, Janet. (2010, July, 21). Ecology: A world without mosquitoes. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/466432a

Government of Canada (2019). Air quality. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/environmental-indicators/air-quality.html

Government of Canada (2021). Climate change adaptation in Canada. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/climate-change-adapting-impacts-and-reducing-emissions/what-adaptation/10025

Government of Canada (2021). Geoscience: Climate Change. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/earth-sciences-resources/geoscience-climate-change/10900

Government of Canada. (2022-November-29). Why biodiversity is important to you. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/biodiversity/publications/why-biodiversity-is-important-to-you.html

​​Lankow, J., Crooks, R., & Ritchie, J. (2012). Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling (1st ed.). Wiley.

Northeast Regional Climate Center. (2022) How are Drought Conditions Classified? https://www.nrcc.cornell.edu/services/blog/2018/06/28/index.html

International Panel on Climate Change (2022). Fact Sheet- Biodiversity: Climate Change Impacts and Risks. https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6wg2/pdf/IPCC_AR6_WGII_FactSheet_Biodiversity.pdf

International Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Summary for Policy Makers. IPCC. Retrieved from https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

Munzner, T. (2014). Why Task Abstraction. In Visualization Analysis and Design (pp. 43–65). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b17511.

National Forestry Database. (2022-May) 3.1.1 Number of fires by cause class. [Dataset]. http://nfdp.ccfm.org/en/download.php

National Forestry Database. (2022-May) 3.2.1 Area burned by cause class. [Dataset]. http://nfdp.ccfm.org/en/download.php

National Forestry Database. (2022). 8.1.1. Area treated with insecticides by product. [Dataset]. http://nfdp.ccfm.org/en/download.php

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2022) Sea Level Trends. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/anomalymapmonth.html

North American Drought Monitor. (2022). Percent Area in North American Drought Monitor Categories. [Dataset]. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/NADM/Statistics.aspx

Rauh, V. et al. (2012, May, 15 ). Brain anomalies in children exposed prenatally to a common organophosphate pesticide. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 109 | No. 20. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1203396109

Schulte, Cara. (2021, May). Canada Bans Use of Toxic Pesticide: One of Many Countries Waking Up to the Dangers of Chlorpyrifos. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/05/20/canada-bans-use-toxic-pesticide

World Bank Group: Climate Knowledge Portal. (2016) Historical Sea Level for Coastal Canada (1993-2015). [Dataset] https://climateknowledgeportal.worldbank.org/country/canada/impacts-sea-level-rise