TreeMap

Birds

The pastime of birdwatching has been transformed by crowdsourced big data. Professional and amateur ornithologists use smartphones to help with identification and keep track of sightings. Cornell University's eBird collects millions of observations each month, organizes and stores them, and makes records widely available.

Making sense of this huge dataset is a challenge. This treemap shows all 68,381 observations in Canada's province of Nova Scotia from June 2013 to May, 2014. It's arranged by county, family and species and colored by month. TreeMap is ideal for high-level impressions and detailed browsing. Different hierarchical arrangements give different insights. Because latitude and longitude are attached to each observation, TreePlot makes useful maps.

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