Tiger Terrains and Timelines: Visualizing India’s Tiger Territories 🐯

Background

• The recent report on the status of tigers by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) of India estimates a significant increase in the tiger population across the country.
• The tiger-populated habitats within the nation have been categorized into 5 landscapes viz.
  • Shivalik Hills and Gangetic Plains,
  • Central Indian and Eastern Ghats,
  • Western Ghats,
  • Northeast Hills and Brahmaputra Flood Plains, and
  • Sundarbans

Aim

• The present work aims to visualize these landscapes as an interactive 3D model using spatial data, and the tiger population using a line plot.

Check the dashboard now!!

Data

• The NTCA report - obtained from NTCA official website
• Spatial data of India
• The xlsx files titled central_ind_data.xlsx, north_east_data.xlsx, shivalik_data.xlsx, sundarbans_data.xlsx, and west_ghats_data.xlsx contain the latitude and longitude coordinates of each habitat which were mapped manually from the NTCA report
• The line_plot_data.xlsx file was developed based on the Tabular data in Table 1.3.2 of the NTCA report

Visualisations (Glimpse!)

• For the 3D plot,
  • the Indian terrain spatial data available online was used.
  • Then, the latitude and longitude coordinates of the landscapes mapped manually using the NTCA report were plotted over the terrain.
  • This mapping process was the most challenging task.

3D Plot - Perspective 1

3D Plot - Perspective 2

3D Plot - Perspective 3

• Further, the tiger population estimates from the report were extracted and presented as a line plot in plotly (the plot below is a static version!).

Line Plot

• It can be observed from the plot that there has been an increase in the number of tigers since 2006.
• Hopefully, the conservation efforts will continue to yield much better results. 🤞🤞

Repo Organization

The following are the folders involved in the Project repository.

• dashboard.qmd: The source code file.

• tiger-viz.Rproj: The R project file

• data/: Used for storing any necessary data files for the project, such as input files.

• figures/: Used for storing the output images.

• sandbox/: This is the workspace for Brainstorming (Does not impact the workflow).