Introduction

Our planet is in trouble. Every day there is another species going extinct, and we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. Scientists warn that human activity is causing the sixth mass extinction. But the dizzying variety of numbers being thrown around to prove there is a crisis only obfuscates the problem. Cataloging animal populations is difficult and imprecise at best.

I sought to create a data visualization to show general trends.

Inspirational Examples

These visualizations are visually compelling in their simplicity and inspired me to create something with a bit more detail to supplement them.

Material

First, I downloaded data on threatened species from the UN’s environmental database. The data was pretty clean, and I created some visualizations with Tableau based on that.

The trend shown by the visualization was contrary to my belief. It showed that threatened species are getting better, not worse. So I went to the UN’s source for their data, IUCN’s Red List, and found their database on the number of threatened species. That visualization also suggests fewer threatened species every year, which would seem to disprove most biologists’ claims of dwindling biodiversity. But I realized that this list did not take species extinction into account, so I downloaded year on year data from Red List to observe trends.

This data was messy. It did not use uniform categories of species or conservation status. I cleaned up the columns and shape of the data initially through Google Sheets. When I was happy with that, I used Open Refine to unify the categories of species, conservation status, and years.

Methodology & Visualization

For the first dashboard, visualizing was very straightforward. I used a line graph to visualize the steady rise in the number of threatened organisms over time, excluding 2009 and 2020, because of incomplete data. I also used the data provided in the same database to create a pie chart showing the different proportions of threatened organisms. For the second line graph, I used Tableau’s percentage function to create a line graph showing the decrease in the percentage of threatened species.

For the second dashboard, I first converted all the categories of conservation status into numbers with 1 being Less Concern and 8 being Extinct. Using Tableau’s filter and distinct count function, I plotted the rise in extinct species over the year for the first line graph. I then calculated the degree of change for each species to see if their situation had worsened or gotten better. I separated the different categories of endangered organisms to see how they fared over time. I excluded both 2009 and 2020 again due to incomplete data.

Reflection

Data collected on wildlife populations is messy because collecting the data is difficult and imprecise. There were definitely a lot of outliers but I didn’t exclude them from the visualizations because I think they are part and parcel of our natural world.

Tableau was a great tool in uncovering trends. The tools provided help gives users a lot of control as to how to manipulate the data. But it does not have a very intuitive or robust visual editing toolset. There were many failed graphs along the way that were either uninsightful or just had no visual impact.