Creating powerful visuals of COVID-19 impacts on human activities
Tutorial: Building a customized visualization of the pandemic impacts using the race.esa.int platform
Sometimes pictures are worth ‘a thousand words’ . With the new feature of RACE dashboard — the COVID-19 and Earth observation platform developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and European Commission (EC), users are now able to create customized dashboard allowing for insightful information and visuals of the ongoing pandemic. This short tutorial shows you how.
RACE dashboard — Rapid Action on Coronavirus and Earth observation
During the spring of 2020 the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission (EC) joined forces to create the RACE dashboard. This user-friendly platform uses Earth observation data (i.e. data coming from satellites orbiting our planet) to monitor and understand the impacts of the pandemic on society, in particular on the economy and the environment.
The RACE dashboard is continuously updated with new data and functionalities, and can help users to shed new light on societal and economic changes taking place due to the coronavirus restrictions measures. The platform offers the possibility to explore a plethora of indicators that goes from environment-related such as air quality or water quality, to economic activities like truck traffic, to name a few examples. (You can find few tutorials on specific indicators listed at the end of this article).
Now, a new feature has been added to this platform (….) enabling users (…) to deliver powerful visuals about the pandemic.
Now, a new feature has been made available — enabling users to create customized views of the the dashboard and to deliver powerful and visual information about the pandemic. With this new feature, users can collaboratively combine indicators from the race.esa.int platform with text, graphics and other media to create personalised story boards and share them online. Here is how:
1. Adding indicators into a custom dashboard
Upon accessing race.esa.int, the first step is to select the first indicators to be displayed, i.e. that will be part of your custom dashboard. In this example, we’ll start with “COVID19 Data” — an indicator presenting the number of cases and vaccinations, globally. The indicator can be selected either from the ‘INDICATORS’ list on the left panel, or in the ‘GLOBAL INDICATORS’ list, floating on the map. Once the country of interest is selected, the chart of that indicator will be loaded into the visualization panel on the right (see below). Clicking on the ‘ADD TO CUSTOM DASHBOARD’ button will add this graph to our customized dashboard.
After adding a chart or map to your custom dashboard, you will be requested to add a Title to your indicator, which can be changed later in the edit mode of the custom view. Once the first indicator is added to the custom dashboard, it can be accessible in the top menu. To add more indicators, the same steps apply.
2. Editing the Custom Dashboard
The custom dashboard can be edited, by accessing ‘CUSTOM DASHBOARD’ at the top menu: titles can be changed, content resized and elements repositioned. Changes to the dashboard will be saved remotely until published, so you will not lose your progress.
To make your graphs easier to understand or to add some more engaging storytelling to the collected data, text blocks can be also added, by clicking on the ‘ADD TEXT BLOCK’ button in the bottom of the custom dashboard view. Like the other elements, text blocks can be resized and they work with markdown so you can add images and media to complement the story.
3. Saving and sharing your custom dashboard
In order to access the custom dashboard and share it with others, it needs to be saved before closing the session. The ‘SAVE DASHBOARD’ button on the top right will open the form below. The permanent link to each dashboard configuration will be sent to the email address provided. Each custom dashboard is assigned an Edit URL and a View URL. Users with access to the Edit URL will be able to make edits to your custom dashboard, and all edits are visible in real time in both the Edit and View modes by anyone with access to the respective URLs, allowing for collaborative editing.
