I decided to keep the story simple: look how the amount of threatened species continues to rise.
After about six hours spent searching for sea turtle population data that was historical and had both quantitative and categorical dimensions that wouldn’t be too difficult to clean, I settled on the UN Threatened Species dataset. For almost every country in the world, the data contains plant, invertebrate, vertebrate, and total threatened species numbers for seven years. There are many conditions that keep this data from telling the full story. The IUCN summary explains potential knowledge gaps and status changes that range from “paperwork” such as recalculations, taxonomic revisions, and found errors, to a species being taken off the threatened list because it has rebounded. Additionally, the data doesn’t include the total number of species in each country, and the amount of threatened species per country doesn’t resonate as much without knowing the relation to the total. The bar graphs from the Society for Biology Conservation attempt to solve that issue. I decided to keep the story simple: look how the amount of threatened species continues to rise.