The Biodiversity Dashboard

Using data streamed from the monitoring program, the dashboard displays real-time values on the number of tiger trafficker arrests, the number of tiger trafficker convictions, the number of detected shipments of tiger parts, and tiger abundance in India. The dashboard consists of four time series plots laid out vertically in the above order.

The JavaFX code that downloads the needed data along with the script that creates the dashboard's graphics is here. The dashboard generated by these two programs is:

Kit #3 Biodiversity Dashboard
Audit information is available at https://insurance_firm.com/tigers/audit/

For purposes of development, the JavaFX program, Inteldash.java queries the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Web Service API for Percent_Tree_Cover observations taken yearly from 2015 through 2023 at the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, India. This is accomplished with three separate queries:

  1. A list of all API-accessible products
  2. A list of available dates of the Percent_Tree_Cover product at the Reserve's GPS coordinates.
  3. A download of Percent_Tree_Cover values in a 1 km square region surrounding this location.

This Percent_Tree_Cover variable replaces the number-of-trafficker-arrests variable simply to show how the provided JavaFX program, Inteldash.java can be used to automatically download data from the web at regular time points. As discussed in this Kit's monitoring webpage, in actual application, the firm's liaison consultant for this biodiversity project (see Cogent Social Sciences 2022) would work with India's Wildlife Crime Control Bureau to set up a web service to provide an API-accessible interface to such number-of-trafficker-arrests data.

The dashboard's graphics are generated with the gnuplotTM (see gnuplot at sourceforge) script, inteldashgraphs.gp that reads data downloaded by the JavaFX program, Inteldash.java. This script is re-run every 24 hours by a call from Inteldash.java. This gnuplot script creates inteldashgraphs.png, a .png image file of the dashboard's graphics. This image file is in-turn, displayed in a customer's browser by this HTML file, inteldashboard.html.

There are two advantages to this procedure for updating the dashboard. First, all computations are performed on the firm's server with only the final rendering of the dashboard performed client-side. Second, dashboard graphics are created by gnuplot -- a free software package that has extensive capabilities.