The Botanic Garden Plants of Concern (POC) program has monitored about 300 endangered, threatened, and rare species at over 300 sites throughout the US Central Wilderness region.
Maintains a centralized database of rare plant information.
Analyses of POCās datasets yield critical information on rare speciesā population trends in relation to management activities on a region-wide basis.
POC has worked with over 100 public and private landowners. For their participation, these landowners receive critical data that helps them set goals and evaluate land management practices.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Our visualizations allow the Botanic Garden, land managers, and volunteers to quickly analyze trends of rare plant populations
PROJECT PURPOSE
The Botanic Garden can use the dashboards to get a high level overview of the species in the program and identify common factors that impact plants across different sites
Land managers can use the dashboards to compare their plant populations to other sites and species and inform their management planning decisions
Volunteers can use these visualizations to gain better insight into what to look for when monitoring the plants
Approach & Design Process
We have a rich dataset, so we wanted to display our data at different granularities in order to provide insights for ranging audience groups
We used a bottom up approach and started with descriptive visualizations for each species and geographical location; we then transitioned to a ābirdās eye viewā with visualizations that depict overall trends in the data
We used filters throughout all visualizations to provide users the flexibility to drill down to a granularity and/or dimension of interest
Challenges
Data Challenge
The dataset we worked with was extremely sparse; there were many missing values for species across different years, making it difficult to to analyze their growth rate. Additionally, many of the variables were ordinal, making it difficult to accurately depict their ordering accurately
Design Challenge
Our target audience consisted of multiple groups: the Botanic Garden, land managers and volunteers; creating a coherent visualization system which accommodated each groupās needs proved challenging
Software Limitations
The chart types in Tableau are limited and in order to utilize the flexibility of D3, we had to deploy and embed our D3 visualizations to our Tableau dashboard.
Implementation
Graphs/Diagrams:
Forced Directed Graph
Network Map
Population Map
Hierarchical Edge Bundling
Bubble Chart
Scatter Plot
Bar Chart
Area Chart
Tools:
Tableau
D3
Integration between Tableau and D3
Filters:
Location
Time
Species
Threats
DESIGN CHOICES - OVERALL
Visual encodings + Gestalt principles
Line/Area - used across all visualizations to represent population size/plant diversity
Color - emphasize the severity to which species are affected by specific threats or management activities
Color/similarity - group species and sites at a higher level
Connectedness/Proximity - showcase counties with similar species
Animated Transitions
Allow smooth visualizations to show changes over time
Aggregation/Filtering
Analyze a species across different dimensions & levels
Focus on a subset of data and analyze trends
KEY INSIGHTS
We observed a steady increase in plant population since the initiation of the plants of concern project, indicating the project has been impactful.
The similarity between sites near the lake are higher than the ones between inland sites, suggesting that sites in close proximity to the lake should collaborate in plant management decisions.
Areas further away are more susceptible to burning and therefore volunteers should closely monitor these populations and look for signs of burning in dry and extreme weather conditions.
Sites near the lake are candidates for erosion; land managers should be particularly mindful of these plant populations and communicate this with volunteers who monitor these areas
IMPACT
Develop an understanding of regional plant diversity.
Identify potential threats in rare plant population.
Visualize rare speciesā population trends in relation to management activities on a region-wide basis.
Allow land managers to inform management planning decisions.