Threatened Australian Animals
The aim for this data visualisation project was to come up with more engaging ways to present the list of threatened fauna under the Australian federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). I imported the data into Excel for analysis and then at the same time work on design concepts in Adobe Illustrator to visualise the information.
I used a different colour for each of the 6 animal groups on the list: Birds = yellow, Mammals = red, Other = orange, Reptiles = brown/green Fish = blue, and Frogs = teal. I also looked for sub-groups, for instance, dividing the 61 threatened reptile into: turtles (13 threatened), geckos & lizards (16 threatened), skinks (23 threatened), and snakes (9 threatened). Similarly, the 66 species in “other” spans: Moths & Butterflies (10 threatened), Snails (20 threatened), Freshwater shellfish (15 threatened), Flying Bugs (10 threatened)*, Creepy-Crawlies (9 threatened)*, and Seastars (2 threatened)*.
* Not depicted on infographic but coming soon.
For the bar chart(1), I used three shades, light/medium/dark, of each colour for the conservation statuses (Vulnerable, Endangered, and Critically Endangered) and added icons and callouts to hook the viewer.
For the tree diagram of all 89 critically endangered Australian animals(2), I added side branches for sub-groups of animals (described above) where possible. I needed to deviate from the colour scheme swapping out the original brown for Reptiles with green, because it was too similar to the dark red for mammals.
I like the clean design of the flow diagram, which works well too with a smaller number of animals - in this case, the 14 species of threatened bat, a sub-group of mammals.
Key: VU = Vulnerable (Light Red); EN = Endangered (Medium Red); CR = Critically Endangered (Dark Red); EX = Extinct (Black)
For this last infographic of the 29 threatened and extinct Australian rodents, I mapped the animal names to the rings of a tree, using the conventional colour for each conservation status.
I hope you enjoy these infographics and that they shed some light on Australia’s “biodiversity index”.
Sources:
Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) List of Threatened Fauna
Notes:
(1) The values for mammals and reptiles in the bar chart will need tweaking, as a species of each has since become extinct.
(2) Since the Christmas Island Pipistrelle and Christmas Island Forest Skink were have become extinct in recent years but were originally classified as critically endangered, I’ve left them in the tree diagram but denoted the Extinct (EX) status. Over the course of the project, I made a unique vector of each animal to use across infographics.