The user can then look more closely at the axes but numbers are not the focal point, I tried to emulate this in my visualizations.
A report from IUCN Red List and one from the UN Sustainable Development Goals convinced me that I could do something interesting with similar data. The third and fourth charts below come from an IUCN statistics summary that they produce each time the Red List of threatened species is updated. I like the simplicity of the line graph, but the stacked bars graph is too busy and I knew I wanted to stay away from that style. The second visualization below is from an article published by the Society for Conservation Biology. One of the bar graphs shows the percent of species that don’t have enough data for the IUCN Red List to make a conclusion. This data problem is an issue that I realized too late and that I will discuss below. The first graph below, from Mongabay, is my favorite and tells a striking story with simplicity. My main takeaway is how the initial preattentive visual communicates the clear message that the rainforest is shrinking. The user can then look more closely at the axes but numbers are not the focal point, I tried to emulate this in my visualizations.