The Online Journalism Blog has created media attention cartograms that show how the world looks from the point of view of different news sources. Cartograms that distort the world by population look quite different:
via Ethan Zuckerman
Archive for the 'Visualization' Category Page 2 of 7
The World Glacier Monitoring Service’s latest report shows that, based on data from 30 glaciers spread in nine mountainous regions of the world, glacier mass balance is negative (i.e. glacier melt exceeds ice formation) and the average mass balance is declining (i.e. more ice is melting each year).
Figure 1a and 1b: Mean cumulative specific net balance (top) and mean annual specific net balance (bottom) from continuously measured on 30 glaciers in 9 mountain ranges for the period 1980-2004, on 29 glaciers in 9 mountain ranges for 2005, and on 27 glaciers in 8 mountain ranges for 2006. (see World Glacier Monitoring Service).
Andy Revkin comments on the report in Farewell to Ice on his weblog, and the USA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center host a collection of repeat photography of glaciers documenting their decline.
See also the previous post Arctic Sea ice at record low.
Malaria Atlas Project used national reports, ecological and epidemological models to create a new global map of P. falciparum malaria risk. Guerra et al 2008 PLoS Medicine estimate that 2.37 billion people live in areas at risk of P. falciparum transmission. However, almost a billion people of those people live in areas with only episodic or very low risk of malaria exposuire suggesting there in substantial possibility of eliminating malaria from these areas. Almost all areas with high risk are in Africa.
Below is a small version of their global map of P. Falciparium (the most dangerous species) of Malaria risk for 2007:
Their maps can be viewed in google earth, as country maps, or as as an ArcGrid file at 0.1 degree spatial resolution.
Evacuation of dead Mountain Gorillas, Virunga National Park, Eastern Congo by Brent Stirton, South Africa.
Winner Contemporary Issues: 1st prize singles from World Press Photo.
Brent Stirton has more photos on his website, and on his blog.
Current industrial agricultural practices produce a tradeoff between agricultural production and the quality of coastal ecosystems, because agricultural fertilizers that increase crop yields lead to the creation of low oxygen hypoxic areas in areas which receive a lot of nutrient rich runoff.
The World Resources Institute and Virginia Institute of Marine Science, has updated Diaz et al’s recent map of coastal eutrophication. They identify 169 hypoxic areas, 233 areas of concern, and 13 systems in recovery.
The WRI Earthtrends weblog writes about the project:
The map shows three types of eutrophic zones:
(1) Documented hypoxic areas - Areas with scientific evidence that hypoxia was caused, at least in part, by an overabundance of nitrogen and phosphorus. Hypoxic areas have oxygen levels low enough to inhibit the existence of marine life.
(2) Areas of concern - Systems that exhibit effects of eutrophication, including elevated nitrogen and phosphorus levels, elevated chlorophyll levels, harmful algal blooms, changes in the benthic community, damage to coral reefs, and fish kills. These systems are impaired by nutrients and are possibly at risk of developing hypoxia. Some of the systems may already be experiencing hypoxia, but lack conclusive scientific evidence of the condition.
(3) Systems in recovery - Areas that once exhibited low dissolved oxygen levels and hypoxia, but are now improving. For example, the Black Sea recovery is largely due to the economic collapse of Eastern Europe in the 1990s, which greatly reduced fertilizer use. Others, like Boston Harbor in the United States and the Mersey Estuary in the United Kingdom also have improved water quality resulting from better industrial and wastewater controls.
Given the state of global data, the actual number of eutrophic and hypoxic areas around the world is likely to be greater than the 415 listed here. The most under-represented region is Asia. Asia has relatively few documented eutrophic and hypoxic areas despite large increases in intensive farming methods, industrial development, and population growth over the past 20 years. Africa, South America, and the Caribbean also have few reliable sources of coastal water quality data.
A more detailed analysis of this data set will be available in February 2008 in a policy note entitled Eutrophication and Hypoxia in Coastal Areas: A Global Assessment of the State of Knowledge (a list of related publications can be found here.
Humanity is now a geological force reshaping the Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and biogeochemistry. This reality has lead Earth System Scientists to argue that we are living in a new geological era - the Anthropocene.
Recently Navin Ramankutty, a colleague of mine here at McGill, and Erle Ellis, from the University of Maryland, have developed a map of the world the acknowledges that we are in the Anthropocene by identifying the anthropogenic biomes that are currently found in the world.
They define an anthropogenic biome as:
Anthropogenic biomes describe globally-significant ecological patterns within the terrestrial biosphere caused by sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems, including agriculture, urbanization, forestry and other land uses. Conventional biomes, such as tropical rainforests or grasslands, are based on global vegetation patterns related to climate. Now that humans have fundamentally altered global patterns of ecosystem form, process, and biodiversity, anthropogenic biomes provide a contemporary view of the terrestrial biosphere in its human-altered form. Anthropogenic biomes may also be termed “anthromes” to distinguish them from conventional biome systems, or “human biomes” (a simpler but less precise term).
The maps can be viewed as PDFs, or interactively using Google Maps or Google Earth. Links to these files can be found in the article in their article Anthropogenic biome maps in the Enclyopedia of the Earth.
The McGill website has a a ten-minute interview with Prof. Ramankutty, and both authors wrote a follow up article Conserving Nature in an Anthropogenic Biosphere on Earth Portal, where they write:
If we say that most ecosystems are now anthropogenic, does this devalue the conservation and protection of “Nature”? Have we given those who oppose conservation a new tool to eliminate conservation altogether? Though this was never our intention, it seems to be a potential repercussion of our work.
Here is our defense.
On the one hand, we are convinced, as are many, that it is time to give up on the “protecting fragile nature” approach to conserving a desirable environment. Managing nature in preserves and leaving the rest of the world to its own devices does not and will not achieve our objectives.
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It is our hope that in this century we can improve our environmental governance by building a citizen’s “morality of nature” through education and participation, rather than by fear of the consequences. Indeed, there are many indications already that we are getting better at managing the environment, and that the regenerative powers of nature are cleaning our rivers, regrowing our forests, and healing the ozone layer.We are already in the driver’s seat. If our collective desire leads us to conserve, preserve, and restore “Nature”, we will all be the better off for this. But managing nature as if everything we touch is destroyed just will not get us to where we want to go.
They describe their map in the paper:
Ellis, E. C., and N. Ramankutty. In Press. Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:XXX. doi:10.1890/070062 . (which is available online before publication).
Croplands and pastures cover about a 1/3 of the Earth’s ice free surface. Foley et al in their PNAS commentary Our share of the planetary pie illustrate the uses of this agricultural production. Their map shows the percentage of crop NPP used to produce food that humans consume directly (blue) or indirectly in processed products (orange-red). The majority of the nonfood portion is feed for livestock, but also includes fiber or luxury crops, such as cotton and coffee. Note the differences between agriculture is rich (feed for livestock) and poor countries (food).
Click on map for a larger verison.
The map is based on data from:
(In Press), Farming the Planet. 2: The Geographic Distribution of Crop Areas, Yields, Physiological Types, and NPP in the Year 2000, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, doi:10.1029/2007GB002947.
In Spain Greenpeace has published a short photo book Photoclima that uses estimates from IPPC and photomontages to show six landscapes of Spain a changed climate. The book is bilingual in Spanish and English.
By Pedro Armestre and Mario Gómez. La Manga del Mar menor, Murcia now and after a few decades of climate change,
On BLDGBLOG Geoff Manaugh comments on how this project, and how not to envision the future in Climate Change Escapism:
The basic idea here is that these visions of flooded resort hotels, parched farmlands, and abandoned villages, half-buried in sand, will inspire us to take action against climate change. Seeing these pictures, such logic goes, will traumatize people into changing how they live, vote, consume, and think. You can visually shock them into action, in other words: one or two glimpses of pictures like these and you’ll never think the same way about climate change again.
But I’m not at all convinced that that’s what these images really do.
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In fact, these and other visions of altered planetary conditions might inadvertantly be stimulating people’s interest in experiencing the earth’s unearthly future. Why travel to alien landscapes when you can simply hang around, driving your Hummer…?
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Climate change is the adventure tour of a lifetime – and all it requires is that you wait. Then all the flooded hotels of Spain and south Florida will be yours for the taking.
Given images like these, the future looks exciting again.
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Of course, such thinking is absurd; thinking that flooded cities and continent-spanning droughts and forest fires will simply be a convenient way to escape your mortgage payments is ridiculous. Viewing famine, mass extinction, and global human displacement into diarrhea-wracked refugee camps as some sort of Outward Bound holiday – on the scale of a planet – overlooks some rather obvious downsides to the potentially catastrophic impact of uncontrolled climate alteration.Whether you’re talking about infant mortality, skin cancer, mass violence and rape, waterborne diseases, vermin, blindness, drowning, and so on, climate change entails radically negative effects that aren’t being factored into these escapist thought processes.
But none of those things are depicted in these images.
These images, and images like them, don’t show us identifiable human suffering.
From Wikipedia, an image of global tropical cyclone tracks (8000 x 4000 pixels).
The map shows the tracks of all Tropical cyclones which formed worldwide from 1985 to 2005. The points show the locations of the storms at six-hourly intervals and colors the points based on the hurricane strength.
Arctic sea ice has reached record low coverage in 2007.
From NASA EOS:
This image shows the Arctic as observed by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite on September 16, 2007. In this image, blue indicates open water, white indicates high sea ice concentration, and turquoise indicates loosely packed sea ice. The black circle at the North Pole results from an absence of data as the satellite does not make observations that far north.
Three contour lines appear on this image. The red line is the 2007 minimum, as of September 15, and it almost exactly fits the sea ice observed by AMSR-E. Depending on the calculations, the minimum occurred on September 14 (one-day running average) or September 16 (five-day running average). The green line indicates the 2005 minimum, the previous record low. The yellow line indicates the median minimum from 1979 to 2000.