What Regions of the World are Facing the Most Deforestation?

[tsp2123]

Pitch

I want to know the rates of deforestation and I want to segment this exploration by region and then again by the country looking into the most deforested country in each region. The goal here is mostly for me to get a hang of making some waffle charts and a time series in QGIS. The ideal form of this project will be one line graph. A few waffle charts according to the region and an explainer focusing on what's been going on these regions.

Summary

I will probably filter this as I go ahead with data exploration, but my assumption is the most compelling will be segmenting regions in Africa and Asia. My goal here is for a more top-down explainer type story that then focuses on some interesting spots "hotbeds of deforestation"

Details

Possible headline(s): "Examining Rates of Deforestation by Region" ...I know, not sexy yet, bare with me Data set(s): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS Code repository:

Possible problems/fears/questions:

Right now I'm having issues with melting my data. Oddly, in this case melt isn't taking my data form wide to long. It's the same wide data, but filtering only the column I've mentioned in the ID_Vars

Work so far

Currently working on data-cleaning I'm going to update this as soon as possible

Checklist

This checklist must be completed before you submit your draft.

• [ ] I have already spent time with my data set, opening it, exploring it, etc
• [ ] I have created a "DIARY.md" file to save links and list all of the terrible, no good problems I come across
• [ ] My issue links to my data set(s)
• [ ] My issue links to my code repository
• [ ] My issue explains what I'd like to explore in the data set
• [ ] My issue includes images - either inspiration or what I've done so far

[sarahslo]

you may want to start with an even more focused data set. looking at a continent is too broad, even one country may have forests in one part and desserts in another. and there are different kind of forests...narrow the question.

[tsp2123]

Update

Your project content: images/words/etc

Hey, I thought a comparative analysis of forest percentages by country might have been interesting. In a sense, you can see deforestation rates/reforestation rates by plotting it as a line graph, but my intention is to then look at some unique countries which have had the highest rates of change in forest percentage.

Perhaps, it's not the most interesting of revelations but you can see through the slopes of the graphs, in general, a higher rate of deforestation in lower-income countries in every continent. Asia Latin America SubSaharan Africa

Here's the crazy thing about Iceland. Since the 90's the country has nearly quadrupled its forest cover in an attempt to make up for historical losses in forest cover due to, of all thing, Viking deforestation. What a place right?

Any changes in direction or topic?

I'm taking your advice and focusing on countries as well

Problems/Questions

No problems so far. admittedly, this isn't the most taxing of projects.

Checklist

• [x] I have included my visuals
• [x] I have filled out the sections above
• [x] I have been updating my DIARY.md with details about my process
• [x] I have uploaded/updated any Jupyter Notebooks or other datasets into my code repository

[jsoma]

Here's the crazy thing about Iceland. Since the 90's the country has nearly quadrupled its forest cover in an attempt to make up for historical losses in forest cover due to, of all thing, Viking deforestation. What a place right?

So yeah, that's crazy, but... the graph doesn't really sell me on that at all. It's just a line! Not very emotional. This is the point where a good idea would be to say okay, Iceland is crazy, let's actually pivot to make everything about Iceland. Maybe throw in a couple other similar-ish countries (or opposite-ish countries) for comparison, just to highlight how crazy it is.

I bet you can find a land cover map to import into QGIS for every few years, which you can use to show the change over time. If you can't find a shapefile, it's time to learn about raster data, which is basically pixel-based data from satellites that you can use to find things like vegetation, drought, etc.

• This is a a week of a GIS class that investigates deforestation - use the links on the left hand side
• You can find raster images here - it's kind of tough to navigate, though.

Also, you might highlight other places where the number has gone up instead of just Iceland, in case that's a trend. Think of it as trying to find the interesting story, not just trying to graph the data!

[tsp2123]

Soma, thank you so much for these links. I was really struggling to put life into this story / dataset but the Carelton link is fascinating. Thank you for this. I'm definitely looking into how I can use this to jump into trying to use satellite imagery to help tell this story. I think another place that has had some remarkable growth is French Polynesia. I'm attaching the photo here.

[sarahslo]

great, what soma suggests is a more focused dataset. iceland and french polynesia are such different places. if you can get the mapping working on both, you can add population data or some basic statistics ala the cia world factbook to give us more context.

it tells you area, for instance, and then you can educate us about these places. how many people? how educated? how much technology?