Our Project:

Climate Change and Endangered Animals

For our project, we wanted to investigate the increasing numbers of threatened animals in recent times, and examine its relationship to the rapidly changing climate of the world. Decreasing biodiversity, as we are experiencing today, is not just a sad fact, it is something that threatens each of our lives as humans.

In our project, we transform data from various sources including the IUCN Red List, the OECD, and the United Nations into various visualizations to show the relationship between various climate change indicators, including emission levels of various gases and deforestation levels over time, and the level of threat posed to the multitude of animals in the world, broken down by country, and by group of species.

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The Red List Index is used to track shifts in biodiversity over time. This visualization animates the change in Red List Index Values in countries on a map of the world between 1993 and 2021.

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While the total number of threatened species being tracked over time cannot show meaningful trends, looking at a singular year can reveal trends among the countries. This visualiation shows the total number of threatened species by country, as assessed by the IUCN in 2021.

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Broken down into groups, the OECD has collected data on each country and the percent of known species in that country that are endangered for each group. This visualization shows those percentages for the OECD countries for each group.

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For decades, greenhouse gas emissions have been on the rise around the world. This set of visualizations shows the breakdown of various emissions by country over time.

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Over the past 10,000 years, Earth has lost nearly 1/3 of land originally covered by forest, or around 2 billion hectares. Additionally, only around 1 billion of the remaining 4 billion hectares remain undisturbed by humans. This visualization tracks the change in hectares of forest in various countries over the past few decades.

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What is the relationship between our changing climate and the increasing number of threatened species across the world? This visualization aims to depict the various datasets over time, globally.

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This visualization takes a look at the correlation between Red List Index values and total emissions by country, over time.