What is it about?
Whale populations have declined dramatically over the last few centuries due to indiscriminate hunting by humans for commercial purposes. However, we have now realised the importance of whales in maintaining the health of the oceanic and as a result, of the global ecosystems. This article is about understanding previous whale hunting activities, and estimating the current status of whale populations around the world to plan management and conservation actions, using WhaleVis - an interactive data visualization dashboard.
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Photo by Mike Doherty on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The interactive dashboard for analyzing historical whale hunting data has been presented at the International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee meeting, in April 2023, and was found to be of interest to whale researchers. They can use this dashboard to understand whale hunting patterns and infer whale population distribution trends over time. This can in turn help whale scientists better plan conservation actions for whales.
Perspectives
This project came up as a collaboration between the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the Center for Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management at the University of Washington, Seattle, under the Computing for the Environment Initiative. It is an example of how we can apply interactive data analytics to environmental science contexts. Specifically, the future versions of this dashboard will include graph analysis capabilities to analyze the routes of whaling voyages to better estimate whale population distributions, and through this work, extend graph analysis for network ecology use cases.
Ameya Patil
University of Washington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Visualizing Historical Whaling Voyages over Time, interactions, August 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3611650.
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