Storytelling with Data: Site History For Rare Plants
My first story is about visualizing the history of rare plant populations in southern California. Our heroes are land managers that manage and monitor those species. The desired outcome is the future survival of these species and populations in the face of major changes on the landscape. Our heroes are trying to overcome technical and social challenges in order to more effectively manage those species.
Think of a place.
Someplace out in the natural world. Someplace important to you. Think about all the events that have shaped that place over time.
Glaciers. The rise and fall of oceans, rivers, or lakes. Migration and settlement of plant and animal species. Fires. Floods. Droughts. Migration and settlement of people. People with small tools or big tools, shaping the landscape. Invasive species. Climate change.
This is a story of a place.
In San Diego California — like other places around the world — local governments and passionate individuals are committed to managing rare species. They want these species to stick around. In order to adaptively manage these highly dynamic environments, they need to systematically monitor the status and trends of key species, large and small.
An invasive species, if left unchecked, will quickly spread to cover a hillside, and smother populations of rare plants. Humans, if unrestricted, will shred sensitive habitats with their off-road vehicles.
To understand the challenges faced by our audience, we had to get away from our computers and out into the real world.
In early 2016, a few software developers and scientists from the Conservation Biology Institute, together with a few key partners, went to a series of spectacular, yet imperiled, landscapes. After we realized we weren’t going to melt in the sun, we explored some of the primary issues facing the continued survival of a handful of rare plant species native to a small area in southern California.
While trying not to step in the wrong place and wipe out an isolated population of tiny succulents, we discussed core challenges facing land managers:
- Limited resources: managers have to prioritize effort
- Lack of centralized records of management activities and monitoring
- Changes in data collection protocols make it hard to easily compare one year to another
- Staff turnover: important information about the history of a site is lost when individuals leave an organization responsible for that area
- They need to be able to share successes and failures, in order to learn from each other
We quickly realized there needed to be a centralized site history for each of these places. We needed to be able to tell the story of a place.
We knew that pictures would help tell our story. Not just pictures of the place, but pictures of the trends. On the flight home, and in the weeks that followed, we developed some fairly grand ideas of a centralized, regional data visualization system. Populating it would take data that we didn’t yet have, and standardizing the limited data that were available across the region was going to take a lot more time than we had available.
Instead, we started small, and built a prototype. When we are trying to figure out something complex, we break it down into smaller pieces. What is the smallest thing that we can build that helps us test our assumptions? But building a prototype to visualize data takes data. Real data from the real world. Because data that we make up almost never test our assumptions in the same way.
Luckily for us, one of the heroes of this story, Betsy — a biologist with the City of San Diego — has been collecting population location, extent, and size for several years for some of the rare plants that fall on the city’s managed lands. She is our hero not only because she happily shared a treasure trove of data for use in our prototype, but because she is also a leader within our target audience. If we could enable Betsy to be more successful through data visualization, we could have broader impacts on management and monitoring within the region.
Betsy collects data from the field, and at the end of each field season she compiles lengthy reports on the management activities and current status of these species in order to justify continued investment in the monitoring and management activities. However, their data collection protocol has changed a few times over the years, which was a barrier in the way of looking at trends over time. Each population’s geographic bounds, the population size, the photos, and other related site information were collected in separate files without the ability to easily join them back together. This was barrier in the way of holistically seeing information about each population.
Being software developers and data junkies, we have different tools in our toolkits. With a bit of elbow grease and generous amounts of scripting, we were able to standardize enough data for enough of the populations to create our prototype and move ahead with testing our assumptions.
Our prototype allows you to start exploring the history of a site. Namely, the trend of a plant population: quantitatively, geographically, and photographically. We were able to look at both the population count, in green, and the population extent, in purple. Years where the population was surveyed but not found are highlighted in orange.
This unique combination of visualizations in this prototype — while exceedingly rough — was enough to shift our perspective from the status of a population in a given year to looking at the story of it over time. It was also enough to start seeing a population more holistically, and easily jump to another population and see if there were similar trends.
From this, we identified lots of room for improvement: adding data about climate, fire and other disturbances, management activities, biophysical characteristics. Unfortunately, these data were not systematically collected, and building a system that allows easy collection of those data is a story for another time.
At the end of our work on this prototype Betsy let us know that she was extremely happy with what we had created so far. It gave her a very powerful perspective into the species she’s been monitoring for several years. She knows these areas inside and out — but seeing it like this was transformative.
She envisioned a future where this sort of visualization would allow her to more clearly describe the challenges and successes on her sites at regional meetings with other land managers, and also for sharing with decision makers to help maintain and expand the momentum for adaptive management and monitoring in this area.
Storytelling with Data (series):
This is a slightly modified version of a talk from the 2017 Symposium by the Sea in Florence, Oregon.
The prototype shown here is just a prototype. We are looking for new ways to apply what we learned from that process to create systems that will transform management of rare species in many places, not just San Diego.
