Data Visualization Design
an Information Visualization Project
Project Overview
According to the USGS, a landslide is defined as the movement of a mass of rock, debris, or earth down a slope. Landslides are a type of "mass wasting," which denotes any down-slope movement of soil and rock under the direct influence of gravity. The term "landslide" encompasses five modes of slope movement: falls, topples, slides, spreads, and flows. These are further subdivided by the type of geologic material (bedrock, debris, or earth). Debris flows (commonly referred to as mudflows or mudslides) and rockfalls are examples of common landslide types. Almost every landslide has multiple causes. Slope movement occurs when forces acting down-slope (mainly due to gravity) exceed the strength of the earth materials that compose the slope. Causes include factors that increase the effects of down-slope forces and factors that contribute to low or reduced strength. Landslides can be initiated in slopes already on the verge of movement by rainfall, snowmelt, changes in water level, stream erosion, changes in groundwater, earthquakes, volcanic activity, disturbance by human activities, or any combination of these factors. Earthquake shaking and other factors can also induce landslides underwater. These landslides are called submarine landslides. Submarine landslides sometimes cause tsunamis that damage coastal areas.
Project Report
The visualization I made is mainly about the landslide that occurs in the United States. By using the data from NASA, I found something interesting about the relationships of different data about the landslide.
By using the dot map visualization of landslide occurrences in the United States (see Appendix A), I found that most of the landslides have happened on the west coast or east. There are very few landslides that happened in mid the United States because the density of dots is very low. Then I made a graph about times of fatalities due to landslide occurrences (see Appendix B). On the graph, it is clear to see that most of the fatalities have happened in the west and the state of Washington has the most fatalities as the number of 30. So then, I decided to combine those two graphs into one, and that is the third graph (see Appendix C). In Appendix C, I can get the information on both landslides and fatalities. In this combined graph, the size of the circle represents the number of fatalities in the state. The bigger the circle, the more fatalities happened. The color of the circle represents the number of landslides that occur, the darker, the more. In this graph, it is easy to find out the relationships between fatalities and landslides. Usually, the more landslides happened, the more fatalities there are. However, there is one exception, which is California. It has a lot of landslides, but only little fatalities.
Since the state of Washington has the most landslides and a lot of fatalities, I wanted to know why. So I made a visualization bar chart about the distribution of different kinds of landslides in the United States (see Appendix D). In this visualization, there are two main kinds of landslide, landslide, and mudslide. The Mudslide has the most data of 256 and then is a landslide with 214. Next, I tried to find out what is the main reason for mudslide, so I made a graph about the distribution of a different kind of Mudslide (see Appendix E). It shows in the graph that downpour and rain are the two main reasons for Mudslide. This result can also be proved in the video of Rebecca Bell about the landslide: What causes a landslide? | Natural Disasters. In the video, she mentions that the main reason for landslide could be rain and downpour (Bell). Lastly, by setting the date as columns, count of times landslide happened as rows, I made a line graph of “times of Landslides happened with time” (see Appendix F). In the graph, I found that the landslides have happened periodically. Most of the peaks in the graph are in Q1, like for instance, 2010 Q1, 2011 Q1, 2012 Q1, 2014 Q1.
By doing this final project and report, I realize I learned a lot about the landslide. Those knowledge are things I have never think about and learned. The original dataset is massive and boring, however, by making them into visualization, those data become interesting and make people easy to understand.
References
Bell, R. (n.d.). What causes a landslide? | Natural Disasters. Retrieved December 23, 2019, from
Appendix Photos
