Shifting bird populations

Using data from the crowdsourced database eBird, Harry Stevens mapped the shifts in bird populations for the Washington Post. Increased building and climate change have led to population declines for many species over the past decade, but some species, such as the blue jay, have seen growth.

Be sure to check out the interactive at the end that lets you search the full species list.

Diligent birders log data on eBird, which they can use to keep track of their own observations. Collectively, researchers can then generate reliable models with the data. The scale of this project continues to amaze.

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Running out of space to grow food

For Associated Press, Christina Larson and Nicky Forster examined the growing population and the land required to feed all the people. A map shows spreading farmland over the centuries and at some point there won’t be enough land to grow food if we continue what we’ve been doing.

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More pets than children in Taiwan

Julia Janicki, Daisy Chung, and Joyce Chou explore Taiwan’s aging population, where in 2021, pets outnumbered children. I like the experimental views in this piece. More of this please.

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Age shifts around the world

The world is getting older overall. For The New York Times, Lauren Leatherby broke it down by country with a set of animated frequency trails, along with charts for more demographic shifts. I like it.

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Population surrounded by interstate highways

Filed under random but fun calculations, Alasdair Rae estimated the number of people within interstate boundaries:

I loaded up a MapTiler streets backdrop layer in QGIS, created polygons from the the US national road network file from the Department of Transportation website (this required a lot of error checking/fixing) and then summed the population of all areas bounded by Interstates – including those in Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico.

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India estimated to pass China in population

Based on the United Nations’ world population report, it is estimated that India’s population will increase past China’s some time this year. For The New York Times, Alex Travelli and Weiyi Cai have charts to show how and why.

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8 billion population visualized

Here’s a fun interactive from The Washington Post to earmark the world reaching 8 billion population. Enter age, country, and gender and you get a mosaic of quarter-circles, each representing 1 or 10 million people depending on the scale of the selected country’s population.

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Splitting the US population evenly, with arbitrary shapes

By Engaging Data, this interactive map shows various splits of the United States with the condition that each division has the same population:

This visualization lets you divide the US into 1,2,3,4,5,8 and 10 different segments with equal population and across different dimensions. The divisions are made using counties as the building blocks (of which there are 3143 in the US). There are numerous different ways to make the divisions. This lets you make the divisions by different types of geographic directions and divisions by population density.

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Where there is more livestock than people in the United States

The United States Department of Agriculture provides annual inventory data on livestock, crops, and various products. The tool is very ad hoc government-looking, but it seems to work well enough.

Erin Davis made some fun maps that use the data at the county level to compare livestock populations to people populations. Davis compared animals individually, but the multivariate one that compares cows, chickens, and pigs is my favorite.

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Football field to show population change in the UK

The Office for National Statistics for the UK published an interactive to show how population has changed:

The population of England and Wales has increased by more than 3.5 million in the 10 years leading up to Census 2021. Using the first results from this census, we look at which places have seen the biggest increases and decreases, which areas had the largest growth in different age groups, and how your chosen local authority area compares with others.

You choose a region and go from there. The best part though is the football (a.k.a. soccer) field used to visualize population density, which communicates the numbers on a relatable scale.

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