Our forests are disappearing. That's a fact. Deforestation has been linked directly to global warming. How about all of the animal species that are going extinct? It needs to stop.

Today, DS21 will help us understand the situation by analyzing data from the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) about forest cover and its change for countries and biomes. This is a very, very wide data set, so planning will be important, and likely a bit of data prep.

• They may supplement the data. There are links to some additional data sources directly in the same page as the data; I have not checked any of these though.
• The focus should be on the analysis, design is a second priority.
• A blog post must be written and viz published to Tableau Public before presentations at 3pm.

Let's see if we can get our heads around the situation. Is it as bad as we heard in the news? Are there areas that are helping address the situation? Are trees being cut at a rate more quickly than we realize? What's the impact on the environment and wildlife?

The data can be found on ArcGIS here.