Coral Reefs

Visualization Map

This page is the landing page for my visualization project. The diagram type Map is preselected at the radio buttons, but it does not show any data until the user clicks on either “show all years” or uses the slider to select a specific one. If the user uses the slider instead, only the selected year is displayed to get a better feeling for the relevance of the data for today, since the data cover a wide range of years. Furthermore its possible to spot changes over the years and how extensively the data were researched. Im purposely showing a negative example here from 2001 where only one specific region was documented.

The user can also zoom in by clicking at interesting areas as the Great Barrier Reef and see some changes there too.

Even if he zooms in at the edges of the map he is still getting a centered view of the region, because i cloned the main map and placed it to the left and right side of the screen too. So its basically displayed three times to get an optimal zoom experience.

Visualization depth and bleaching in percent

If the user switches to the diagram mode a scatter plot is displayed. The interaction elements work as before but the way the data are displayed changed. Now the location is not important anymore its just about depth of the reefs and the bleaching level. If you skip through the years you can get that if are located deep in the ocean its unlikely for them to bleach but the ones that are on the surface bleach relatively often. A good example for this is the graphic for 2010.

On the total view you can see even better that below a certain point around 25 meters not a single reef is bleached severely and below 10 meters there is only a single one that is bleached completely and the bleaching is much lower percentage in general.

Visual Style