April 15, 2024, 1 a.m.

Week 1:Australian flora in trouble

Unraveling numbers

A chart and some thoughts. That is all.

Chart showing the size of each class of animal and plant in Australia that is Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Conservationally Dependant, Extinct in the Wild and Extinct. The chart shows each group as a circle with the size of the circle representing the size of each group. The size of different plant species is overwhelmingly the largest group of species under threat.

Data is sourced from data.gov.au and shows Threatened Species and Ecological Communities of National Environmental Significance.

I've used this data set quite a lot over the years. It's updated at least once a year, and there is a lot more detail for you to go and explore if you are curious. I'm always struck by the overwhelming number of plants in danger, or nearly lost/already lost to us. Flowering plants are overwhelmingly in trouble - all those bees! All those habitats and food for animals!

Thank you so much for subscribing. If you are looking at this on your mobile, I apologise for how teeny-tiny this may look on your screen. Ive attached a PDF that you can download to zoom in and explore. Or open up on your desktop or tablet if you can, and want to have a closer look. And maybe have a look at a beautiful plant or tree where you live and give it some appreciation. It's existing in spite of us, and that resistance can be celebrated in these shitty times.

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Anyhow, it was a real joy making this chart - although a little sobering. This is getting worse every time I look at this data set. I played around using raw graphs which was a nice way to quickly see different types of charts and graphs using this dataset. I used my beloved R to do may data manipulation and that can be found here on github but there is honestly not much to see. I basically did some aggregation in R, exported the file and played around using RAW, then messed about with the generated SVG in Illustrator, which after using PPT so much lately at work, was a real pleasure to use again.

If you have any feedback, let me know. And thanks again for so many of you subscribing. I appreciate it very much.

Next week the data set will be about movies. Not sure yet specifically, but I am thinking of a few different angles.

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This newsletter was created on Gadigal Land. Just up the river from where I live, pictures and marks were made on rocks to share stories about the world with others, and they were put there tens of thousands of years ago. I want to acknowledge that this tradition of story telling and using images to communicate and pass on information is nothing new - and the Custodians of this unceded land were here, and doing it first.

You just read issue #2 of Unraveling numbers. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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