Browsing by Author "Kusnick, Jakob"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Sustainable Urban Wastewater Treatment Visualizations
    (The Eurographics Association, 2022) Vega, Juan Marin; Uri-Carreño, Nerea; Kusnick, Jakob; Jänicke, Stefan; Krone, Michael; Lenti, Simone; Schmidt, Johanna
    The handling and treatment of urban wastewater are essential to protecting human health and the environment. However, its existence and importance are mostly invisible to the general public. In this work, we present a set of visualization system designed to communicate and visually explore the wastewater treatment system of Vandcenter Syd (VCS), one of the largest water utilities in Denmark on the island Fyn. It operates eight wastewater treatments, and our solution enables geographically exploring and comparing data collected in different facilities with an interactive map. We further provide a set of interactive visual interfaces to support exploring the energy consumption and production trends over the past 10 years. A case study on Ejby Mølle, VCS's largest facility, illustrates its transition from an energy consuming into an energy producing facility.
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    Visualization-based Scrollytelling of Coupled Threats for Biodiversity, Species and Music Cultures
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Kusnick, Jakob; Lichtenberg, Silke; Jänicke, Stefan; Dutta, Soumya; Feige, Kathrin; Rink, Karsten; Zeckzer, Dirk
    Biodiversity loss, land use change and international trade are the main causes for an increasing number of endangered species. As a consequence resource scarcity due to endangered species also threatens cultural heritage. To depict such coupled threats and their interconnections for the specific case of musical instruments of a symphony orchestra, the MusEcology project developed a platform to analyze dependencies between musical instrument manufacturing for symphony orchestras, and threat assessments to plant and animal species used as resources. Non-experts are rarely aware of this intertwined threat. Therefore, low-threshold information distribution is urgently needed. We extended the MusEcology platform with scrollytelling functionalities helping domain experts drafting stories that use the visualizations of different dimensions throughout various zoom levels. We outline the utility of our approach with a particular scrollytelling example of the threatened pau-brasil wood (Paubrasilia echinata (Lam.) Gagnon, H.C.Lima & G.P.Lewis), endemic to the Brazilian Mata Atlântica, ever since 1800 used for sticks of high-quality string instrument bows. The story of the natural material from forests to instrument-making workshops, musicians and audiences is told through informative texts, interviews, sound recordings, photographs, and schematic drawings. By bringing together expertise from different fields, this story highlights the interconnected dependencies between ecosystems, culture, and music. The interactive storytelling experiences are aimed at casual users and policy makers to raise awareness of the underlying complexity of biodiversity and instrument making, to support related and induce necessary decision making processes, and to unfold possible pathways towards a more harmonic and sustainable music ecosystem.
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    Visualizing National Threat Assessments of Tree Species
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Schnoor, Christina; Rieck, Kristoffer Bargisen; Beech, Emily; Rivers, Malin; Kusnick, Jakob; Jänicke, Stefan; Dutta, Soumya; Feige, Kathrin; Rink, Karsten; Zeckzer, Dirk
    Trees are important to ecosystems around the world, and therefore it is vital to know which species are in particular need of conservation. The GlobalTree Portal primarily focuses on threat assessments at the global level, but nation-level investigations of threat assessments are not yet supported. Regional or national assessments are also displayed, even if the species was not evaluated in a country. This paper presents a visualization framework that enables domain experts to analyze national assessments inspired by the GlobalTree Portal. This visualization first provides a global overview of nation-level threat assessment efforts by highlighting those with many national assessments on a choropleth map. For a selected country, the experts can inspect how the tree species assessments are distributed across BGCI's threat level categories Not Evaluated, Data Deficient, Not Threatened, Possibly Threatened, Threatened, and Extinct. The core component is a tree map visualization that displays the genera and the species within the selected country. These are color-coded according to the BGCI threat level, and thus, provide a quick overview of nation-level threat assessments at species and genus levels. The system was developed in close collaboration with biologists from BGCI, who evaluated the visualizations on a regular basis to fit their needs. The results certify the value of our solution for gaining quantitative insights about threat assessments on a national level, and BGCI researchers included the system in their work routines to impact decision making processes on national conservation actions.
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    Visualizing Sunlight Radiation in the Arctic Ocean
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Sørensen, Esben Bay; Attard, Karl; Gattuso, Jean-Pierre; Kusnick, Jakob; Jänicke, Stefan; Gillmann, Christina; Krone, Michael; Lenti, Simone
    The Arctic is experiencing dramatic environmental transformation due to rising temperatures and melting ice, which are affecting its environment, wildlife, and human communities. Remote sensing technologies (e.g. satellites) are increasingly being used to understand environmental change in the remote and understudied Arctic Ocean across broad spatial and temporal scales, generating vast data sets that require interactive visualization to be dynamically explored. We present a prototype visualization that uses aggregation means on different zoom levels to allow exploring a 200GB data set on sunlight in the Arctic Ocean, which consists of monthly time series of coastal pixels, photosynthetically available radiation (PAR), light attenuation coefficient (KPAR), and PAR estimated at the seafloor (PARBOTTOM) from 1998 to 2018. Our main example-the analysis of trends in sunlight radiation levels along the west coast of Greenland-exemplifies our tool's value for marine biologists to getting a concise and interactive overview of sunlight radiation levels, which allows studying potential impacts on the Arctic ecosystem.