Biodiversity is an important aspect of planet Earth and accounts for all life. So, it is critical to record and evaluate the number of species around us so that we can infer the importance of ecological diversity. Hence, in our project, we will be working on the development of visual idioms to study the diversity of species in India with the aid of data visualization techniques in order to deliver raw data in the most efficient way possible. Through a collection of user requirements and idiom designing, we aim to prepare a website as well. The website would serve as a platform for implementing, viewing, and interacting with the visual idioms which would represent the relations and trends related to the biodiversity of species in India.
There are more than 45000 species of plants and 91000 species of animals in India, accounting for about 8% of all recorded species in the world. Having 4 biodiversity hotspots, our country is very biodiverse in nature. As the role of biodiversity in species plays a major role in boosting the productivity of our ecosystem and has social benefits such as cultural and recreational values, it is crucial to address the gradually declining biodiversity as all species are heavily interdependent on each other.
- Numpy
- Matplotlib
- Pandas
- Seaborn
- Plotly
- Altair
- Streamlit
- Geopandas
- HTML & CSS using streamlit
- Herokuapp (deployment of website)
Target users consist of Wildlife Photographers who want to check for specific species in a region, Nature enthusiasts who want to check the IUCN status of species for conservation of species. The idioms can be also used to spread awareness amongst students about the declining rate of species or what kind of species are endemic to India. The target user domain was selected after going through questionnaires and research papers.
We have analysed the requirements of our target audience and their expectations from our project. This research helped us identify the type of data essential for our project. The users need an attractive and easy to interpret website so that information can be viewed effortlessly. The data for our dataset is taken from government portals and other trusted sources. It was prepared such that the users can perceive maximum information without wasting their time. Our idioms have been prepared by taking the users' queries in consideration and they visually solve most of them.
Due to the abstract nature of gathered data, we had multiple options for visual encoding. We encoded data based on multiple visual attributes such as size, shape, colour, grouping, position, etc. The idiom design is dynamic as the visual encodings respond to real-time changes done by the user in order to get a better understanding of the graphs. We have provided multiple idioms as well in order to give the user more flexibility.
The algorithms used in our project play an important role and affect factors such as computation time and output. An instance would be the data collection technique, for which we used CSV (comma-separated values) instead of dataframe. This influenced the computation time positively as data frames tend to be less effective than CSVs with respect to execution time.
