Last week, i went camping with my family in the white mountains area of New Hampshire. It was a great experience. On the last day of our trip, i learned that the region is home to some 4500 black bears.
Well, once home, I immediately began thinking about visualizing something related to our trip, and the black bears came to mind..
The White Mountains area is about 3400-3600 square miles in diameter. With a 4500 black bear population, it means there are likely a bear or two on each square mile on average. Of course, the reality is much more complex, and things like terrain, and human activity certainly effect the bears distribution, but for simplicity sake, i created a 6X6 grid with 36 squares, each representing one square mile. Then, i draw one, two or none bears in each cell. Finally, I added you as a point of reference to how far you might be from black bears when camping, and layered the whole thing on a nice image of the area. The result is below. You can click the visualization to move the population around. Just another example of how far our html5 dashboarding technology can be stretched to visualize any kind of information.. Of course, this works great on any device, except when on camp, where there’s probably no cell service..
Click visualization to shuffle population: