Target audience
General
Supervisor
Dr. Jodie Jenkinson
Date completed
April 2020
Tools used
Adobe Photoshop
Excel
Goals
To show how net primary production (NPP) fluctuates through time in Canada through the span of 1 year. this piece will be showing the NPP of each month in 2015 in Canada (the last year they had complete data for), with data derived from NASA’s Earth observation program, using Powermap offered by Excel.
Process
Research and Data Cleanup
All the data used in this project came from NASA’s Earth observation program. Initially, I had wanted to do this project on a global scale, but there were simply too many data points to process. Even after I had reduced the scope to Canada alone, I was still left with 90 000 data points to contend with. Due to the sheer volume, I had to find Excel scripts online to help automate the data sorting.
Figure 1a. Screenshot of the data from NASA. The imprint of the continents can be seen in this data, thanks to the disparity of data point values between land and water.
Figure 1b. A close-up image of Figure 1a, showing the units of NPP organized by latitude and longitude.
Layout
I had chosen this form of communication because the rise and fall of the bars through time would resemble the rise and fall motions of breathing. This helps to link NPP (a metric linked to photorespiration) to its product, oxygen, which we breathe.
Graph elements (right) are used to highlight which ecozone has the highest and lowest NPP, its colors matching the ecozone color coding. The position of each ecozone graph will shift and be ranked by NPP, while simultaneously highlighting the month that the main element has reached on a graph that shows all the NPP of one year in a given ecozone.
Figure 2. Layout sketch
Elements encoded:
Latitude and longitude: coordinates embedded in the map
NPP: height of green bars
Average temperature: scale on the left side, dividing Canada into 5 sections, each section will have its temperature for that month averaged
Provincial geography: embedded in the map
Ecozone: color-coded on the map, simplified down to arctic, boreal, prairies, and northwestern forests, as per Canadian geographic
Time: animated gif of the mapped region through time, and in linear graphs on the right.
Figure 2. Map generation in Excel
I chose Excel largely due to its less heavy demand on computer power and its ability to generate maps with 3D bars without the need for heavy coding. The visual quality of the visual output was sufficient for what I had envisioned.
Figure 3. Overlaying the data
Once the map was generated, I overlayed and aligned them in Photoshop to create the illusion of animation.
Figure 4. Temperature mapping
I took NASA’s land temperature data and created a bar that encodes the temperature of each month throughout Canada’s latitude.
Figure 5. Putting it all together
This was done in Photoshop because my computer could not run After Effects efficiently.
Mockup Credits
Mockup psd created by customscene - www.freepik.com
https://www.freepik.com/psd/mockup
References
How to stack columns of data into one column in Excel. (2019, November 22). Retrieved March 26, 2020, from https://nandeshwar.info/useful-procedures/stack-columns-of-data-on-one-column/
Land Surface Temperature [Day] (1 month - Terra/MODIS). (2019). Retrieved March 15, 2020, from https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=MOD_LSTD_M&year=2015
Net Primary Productivity. (2019). Retrieved March 4, 2020 from https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/global-maps/MOD17A2_M_PSN
Royal Canadian Geographic Society. (2014). Ecozones. Retrieved March 5, 2020 from http://www.canadiangeographic.com/wildlife-nature/?path=english/ecozones-list