Data Story on Red List 2008/2009

Hello Everyone! Thank you for dropping by to take a look at my data story on Red List 2008/2009.

Introduction

I grew up watching documentaries and I am always amazed by the Mother Nature. In this data story of mine, I will be looking into the impact of human population growth against the growing number of endangered species. Since I only managed to find Red List 2008/2009 dataset, my analysis can only zoom into these two years which I dare say that it might not be sufficient for an accurate analysis, but well do hope you enjoy it nevertheless.

Sources

World Population dataset

• http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/90178419-9a13-3010-3cb2-f14538d6543b

Endangered Species dataset

• http://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/oct/23/endangered-species-red-list-data-review

Getting Started

1. Merge the two dataset with ISO Country Code as unique key
2. Apply semantic enrichment to create hierarchy in the merged dataset with ISO Country Code as reference
3. Create two calculated measure from existing measures
   1. a. Endangered Gain (Endangered 2009 minus Endangered 2008)
   2. b. Population Gain (Population 2009 minus Population 2008)

Analysis

For this analysis, I used the bubble chart to visualize my data and I can easily see the countries that have the highest population gain or endangered species gain.

With above data visualization, the information is still not sufficient as different countries have different population. Therefore, I made used of both bubble width and height functions.

Now, I can see the total population in relative to the total endangered species for a country. Those with tall circle are countries with high population and vise versa. Those with fat circle are countries with high number of endangered species and vice versa.

Then, I further select those countries with high endangered species gain to find out what went wrong.

By zooming into these countries in the outlier, I am surprised to see that countries with high population has around the same number of endangered species as countries with low population. In fact, some low population countries have higher number of endangered species.

Conclusion

I always have the assumption that growing population will lead to growing number of endangered species in a country. However, this is not necessary true. In fact, it is human activities that cause the growing amount of endangered species in the world. These activities include deforestation, urbanization or even breaking of food chains.

Therefore, you might chance this blog because of the ultimate data geek challenge or learning about SAP Lumira, but hope you can also get the message that this blog post is trying to convey. I hope that after you have read through this blog post, you will be more aware of human impact on this whole eco-system.

Before you close this blog, here is a song for everyone. Cheers!