In mid-2018, I and my colleagues at Duke, SkyTruth, and Appalachian Voices published a novel dataset: the yearly spatial extent of surface coal mining in the Central Appalachian region of the United States from 1985 through 2015.
In this presentation, I will briefly review our methods and results of this research. But I will spend more time to explore a unique problem we ran into when writing the paper: how to visualize a physically giant but non-congruous spatial dataset?
Through our research, we found over 2900 km^2 of land had been mined during this time period; while simply communicating that number is easy, visualizing it in a meaningful, understandable way proved challenging. I will discuss how we approached this problem and perhaps even solicit your ideas for how you would have visually communicated these data.
Learn more about Duke Visualization Friday Forum and browse other events.
Andrew Pericak is Editor in Chief of SciPol.org at the Duke Initiative for Science & Society. He received the Master of Environmental Management degree from Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment in 2016, at which he specialized in Environmental Economics and Policy.
