Project Limitations

A large reason for me starting this project was that I felt there was a need to be able to see the bigger picture of the situation with Endangered species. There are many great resources that talk about each specific species but it's not very clear the large impact humans have on all species. A big reason for this, as I found through my research, was the lack of hard data for important factors such as the population of the species. Many species' populations are unknown and many have general ranges such as over 3,000 or different ways of looking at population such as 265,000 breeding pairs or 19,000 in the wild instead of stating the total population. This lack of information or differently presented information makes it very hard to compare or even fully understand exactly how much danger each species is facing.

Instead of focusing on population, I focused on other important factors that had more information, such as the kinds of threats each species faced and where they are located. I also only looked at species that had more information on them. This of course could potentially create a bias in the overall picture; however I am hoping it still gives a better idea of what is happening to the species in Africa, than there was before.

Final Words

After plotting my collected information, there were a few trends that I noticed with the data. The majority of the endangered species resides in East Africa, whereas the least amount resides in North Africa. Most of the endangered species are in the least concern category. The majority of the endangered species are facing two human-caused threats. The biggest threat for most of the Africa species is habitat loss and disruption. Saving endangered species may seem like a daunting task, but hopefully this data visualization will give an idea of where our efforts should be concentrated in order to help as many species of Africa as we can.

Data from

World Wildlife Fund and A-Z Animals. More information about each species, the dangers they face, why they are important and how you can help can be found at WWF and A-Z Animals.

Images

Welcome image (African Savanna Elephants). Gallery images (WWF, A-Z Animals and Wikipedia).

Website created by

Amanda Theyers for YSDN Interactivity Design 3 with Borzu Talaie. Thank you for viewing.