Storytelling with Data: Conservation Priorities in Your Pocket
Like many areas, the Southeast is a region where collaboration, consensus, and engagement are critical to success. Like our first story, this one is about how to tell the story of a place through mapping and data visualization. This story is about enabling our heroes, the South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative, to better tell that story using data. If we can increase their ability to collaborate with key decision-makers, we can impact regional conservation outcomes.
The South Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative (SALCC) is one of 22 LCCs around the U.S. The LCCs are partnerships that work across jurisdictions in order to achieve more effective, cross-cutting landscape-level conservation. They collaborate with many organizations to create shared conservation strategies, and help put science to work on the ground.
At CBI, we have been lucky enough to work with many of the LCCs over the years. We’ve helped most of them create Conservation Planning Atlases within Data Basin, so that they can more easily share their data with their audience. We’ve also worked with several to provide science and technology support services, such as creating tools like the one featured in this story.
Every year, the SALCC works very hard to roll out improvements to their Conservation Blueprint. This is a vision for shared conservation priorities across several states in the southeastern US. By collaborating with many stakeholders throughout the region, they are able to build consensus toward shared conservation action. Actions such as restoration, preservation, and education. With a regional perspective, rather than following political or administrative lines. This allows organizations large and small to better justify investment in conservation in particular areas, because they can demonstrate that they are working within a larger set of priorities, rather than only their own.
The SALCC is one of the most incredible groups I’ve ever worked with. That they’ve been able to do this within a government agency is truly remarkable. They are extremely collaborative, and they have made the needs of their users one of their top priorities. Rather than just creating and publishing data layers, they also have dedicated staff positions focused almost exclusively on empowering their users to apply the Blueprint. They also don’t take themselves too seriously.
They work very hard to understand their users. They take a lean startup approach, meaning that they start with the smallest possible thing, then iteratively improve it through targeted feedback with their stakeholders. I’ve seen them go from brainstorming an idea one day to testing it on a couple key users the next day.
What you have to appreciate is that this approach is completely unlike testing the ideas out on yourself or your close colleagues. Unless you or your colleagues are the only users, you will get this wrong. Testing with real users is essential.
In the early days of the Blueprint, conservation priorities were driven by experts assembled in workshops across the region. In the last couple of years, the SALCC has adopted a data-driven approach instead. Using a series of key indicators of ecosystem health, they are working to create a more defensible, iteratively improvable map of conservation priorities.
However, the introduction of data created several unique challenges. We needed to provide an easy way to visualize not only the map, but also the indicators that were helping drive high priorities. In order to help users achieve understanding of the Blueprint — which is key to achieving buy-in — we needed to communicate that complex information in a way that is compelling and easy to understand.
Our first few versions of the Blueprint viewer did a reasonably good job of communicating complex information. You could see WHERE, WHAT, and start to explore WHY an area was a priority. You could start to discover the story of a place, through looking at a location through the lens of the Blueprint priorities and ecosystem indicators.
After having published and refined a web-based version of the Blueprint viewer, the SALCC discovered that our approach fell short in one key context. They have a lot of meetings with their stakeholders, both opportunistically in and around other meetings within the region, and through targeted site visits. However, access to wifi from their laptops — a requirement for interacting with the Blueprint viewer — was often difficult to obtain. Simply booting up the laptop to show a key decision-maker took too long.
They needed to pull out their phones, and quickly demonstrate a key aspect of the Blueprint.
So we set about on an experiment. Could we adapt a visualization tool intended for large monitors to something small enough to fit in your pocket? Given these very narrow constraints, could we still communicate complex information? Collaborating closely with the SALCC, we went back to the drawing board.
We learned several essential lessons in this process:
- be extremely minimal in the amount of information we show on screen
- be very thoughtful about context, so that the user doesn’t get lost
- simplify, simplify, simplify! Can we communicate the same idea with less visual information?
In many ways, this was the process of letting go.
Letting go of the details. Letting go of showing so many things at the same time. We were trying to find the story within the data, we just needed to remove some of the layers.
To imply that we knew what we were doing at the outset would be false.
We tried a lot of experiments.
We used whiteboards and paper, even using a “lift the flap” approach to showing touch interactions. We created digital design mockups, so that we could easily move pieces around or adapt them as new ideas came up. Once we started developing code, we kept experimenting.
Is there a simpler way to present this information? Can we express the same concept with fewer words or graphics?
Everything that remained, we subjected to a rigorous test: did it communicate the essential information? If not, it had to go.
Once we were done, we were pretty happy with the result. There wasn’t much left that could be simplified further.
By empowering our heroes with data in a form that they can carry around in their pocket, we hope they can better share conservation priorities, and contribute to long-lasting conservation outcomes.
Storytelling with Data (series):
This is a slightly modified version of a talk from the 2017 Symposium by the Sea in Florence, Oregon.
We hope to release the South Atlantic LCC’s mobile Blueprint viewer in the next few months, coinciding with the next major release of their Blueprint.
