GloBI Explorer: Interactive Ecosystem Explorer

Abstract— As science and technology have progressed, the computing power available to solve problems has increased. In the last 100 years mankind has gone from manned space flight to sequencing the genomes of humans and other species. One area where science has just begun to look is the complex interactions of all living organisms on the planet. Global Biotic Interactions
(GloBI) has taken on the task of aggregating and organizing the various datasets containing these interactions. GloBI also makes the data publicly available. The goal of this project, the client capstone of Indiana University’s Information Visualization MOOC, was to create an informative, effective and engaging visualization for the data provided by GloBI. GloBI Explorer utilizes an interactive card-based interface to view taxon interactions. A particular taxon’s network can then be analyzed using a columnar, hierarchical tree. A map-based, bipartite graph details geographic interactions for two selected taxons. GloBI Explorer will be deployed as a tool to help middle school and high school students learn about ecology and biology. A live version of GloBI Explorer is deployed on GitHub Pages