Introduction
From 1960 to 2020, economic loss due to species invasion were estimated to be at at least $1.22 trillion dollars with an average annual cost of $19.94 billion (Fantle-Lepczyk 2022). Given knowledge gaps on accounting practices, the true number is likely much higher. This figure also does not account for the untold loss in regional biodiversity and ecological devastation as it solely evaluates species invasion in economic terms.
The National Wildlife Federation defines invasive species as “any kind of living organism—an amphibian (like the cane toad), plant, insect, fish, fungus, bacteria, or even an organism’s seeds or eggs—that is not native to an ecosystem and causes harm.” (NWF, n. d.) These species are mostly introduced into their new environments whether intentionally or unintentionally by human activity (NOAA, 2019).
Inspiration
Given the importance of the impact invasive species have on both the economy and ecology of the region they are introduced to, we wanted to create a platform that could communicate the data surrounding this issue in a way that is interactive and interesting to a wider audience. For that, we turned to both traditional data visualization methods as well as sonification as an alternative modality.
As a team, we were particularly interested in sonification as a data presentation avenue due to its unique ability to complement traditional data visualization techniques. By provided a different sense to interpret data, it can augment the audiences ability to intuitively understand the data presented to them. Furthermore, it can help increase accessibility to those who may be unable to interact with visual media, such as those with visual impairments. All these facets made it appealing to explore what sonification could do for our own project (Russo, 2024).
What it does
We took a few key metrics from a 2016 paper on species invasion and mapped them on a country by country basis (Turbelin, 2016). This paper developed S_Inv which measures how many invasive species a country has, S_Nat which measures how many invasive species originate from a country, and a species asymmetry index which quantifies how disproportionately a country imports or exports invasive species. Our platform displays these metrics along with traditional metrics like GDP on an interactive map allowing users to evaluate the state of species invasion per country.
Sonification is incorporated by playing a series of notes as a user hovers over a particular country in question. The hope was that by tying a higher species invasion index with a higher pitch and harsher sounds, the user would have an auditory experience that would induce a feeling of urgency or anxiety when evaluating countries that are heavily impacted by species invasion.
How we built it
On the technical side, we used SvelteKit + Bun to develop the interactive web application. D3 was used for the visualization, MapLibre for the mapping, and TailwindCSS for the styling. Python was used to do the data wrangling and analysis. Most interestingly, we used ChucK, specifically WebChucK through WebAssembly, a strongly-timed programming language for sounds synthesis and music composition, to create the sonification.
On the data side, we procured the species invasion indices from the previously mentioned 2016 study and matched those with that year's data on GDP, per capita GDP, land mass, country population, etc from publicly available databases mainly with the United Nations, IMF, and World Bank.
Challenges we ran into
One of the largest challenges we faced when building our site related to data procurement. While there are comprehensive databases maintained by researchers globally that quantify occurrences of species invasion, processing that data such that it is usable and transmittable to a wider audience for the purposes of this project would take significantly more time than we had available. Namely, data would often be organized geographically, temporally, or taxonomically, but finding resources where data was organized by country as a time series would require significant effort on our part to create such a dataset for display. Therefore, our team primarily based our project on a dataset published in a 2016 study that developed a few indices to quantify species invasion globally (Turbelin, 2016).
On the other hand, a more creative challenge we faced was the creation of the sonification. There were a myriad of artistic questions we faced, some of which include the type of sonification, the type of sound synthesis algorithm, the auditory parameters to be sonified, the timbre of the synthesizer, and most importantly defining how we reason through all of these decisions. For example, we mapped the number of species native to a country but are invasive in other countries to the rate of a grain in a granular synthesizer; this could have been an arbitrary decision, but the justificaation was that the faster rate would produce not only higher-pitched and harsher sounds, but also speed up the playback rate of the grain (as the name suggests) to give a more hostile-sounding sonic experience.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of
- The work that we did to clean, unify, and source the datasets. We faced challenges in getting data for our invasive species predictive task and had to run several scripts through Python and R to clean and join them.
- Our integration of machine learning methods into our project by using multiple machine learning models to predict the outputs for our sonification model.
- Our integration of prototyping to incorporate sonification and analyze the meaning of the sounds across multiple datasets in a visual and audible manner.
- The UI design of our web app.
- The inspiration behind the project and the work we put in to identify good datasets to work with.
What we learned
This was the first hackathon for all members of our team, so we learned a lot about conceiving a project to complete in a very short amount of time, and also developed our technical skills in exploring sonification and creating a web application to showcase our results. We also worked with new sets of data, including satellite data to calculate the NDVI.
What's next for On a High Note: Ecology and Sonification
There are many possibilities for On a High Note. Most immediately, an interactive exhibit such as this could be perfect for an exhibition such as CCRMA WAVE (The Wall for AudioVisual Expression at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). Furthermore, On a High Note could be developed further as an exploration into the intersection of the new GEP metric and auditory display, which would lend itself nicely to workshopping and presentation at a conference such as ICAD (International Conference on Auditory Display). All of this is also to emphasize the potential pedagogical value of On a High Note, which could be used as an excellent tool for science communication and a useful platform for listeners to conduct their own exploratory data analysis in an artful manner.
Future iterations of this project could also include a time series (given enough time to create the relevant dataset), so that users can see how species invasion has impacted countries on an annual basis. This would help our audience understand the scale, distribution, and depth of species invasion over time as well as how species invasion trends might change with shifting economies. Branching areas of research could also use this as a predictive tool so that relevant stakeholders could see which countries are likely to be heavily impacted in the future, thus giving them a way to make decisions around mitigation policies and resource allocation.
References
Jean E. Fantle-Lepczyk, Phillip J. Haubrock, Andrew M. Kramer, Ross N. Cuthbert, Anna J. Turbelin, Robert Crystal-Ornelas, Christophe Diagne, Franck Courchamp, Economic costs of biological invasions in the United States, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 806, Part 3, 2022, 151318, ISSN 0048-9697, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.151318
NWF (n.d.). Invasive species. National Wildlife Federation. https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Threats-to-Wildlife/Invasive-Species
NOAA. (2019, April 2). What is an invasive species?. NOAA’s National Ocean Service. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/invasive.html#:~:text=Invasive%20species%20are%20animals%20or,and%20most%20often%2C%20by%20people.
Russo, M., Gernon, T.M., Santaguida, A. et al. Improving Earth science communication and accessibility with data sonification. Nat Rev Earth Environ 5, 1–3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00512-y
Turbelin, A. J., Malamud, B. D., & Francis, R. A. (2016). Mapping the global state of invasive alien species: Patterns of invasion and policy responses. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 26(1), 78–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12517
Built With
- bun
- javascript
- python
- pytorch
- r
- svelte
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