Eva Richter

A powerful and moving #dataviz.

Identifying birds that are visible in photos or audible in audio or video recordings can sometimes provide important clues when doing geolocations. Learn more about the bird identification tool Merlin in @bellingcat.com's Open Source Investigation Toolkit: bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit/more...

GitHub - Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi: A realtime acoustic bird classification system for the Raspberry Pi 5, 4B 3B+ 0W2 and more. Built on the TFLite version of BirdNET. A realtime acoustic bird classification system for the Raspberry Pi 5, 4B 3B+ 0W2 and more. Built on the TFLite version of BirdNET. - Nachtzuster/BirdNET-Pi

BirdNET also has an app that lets you classify bird sounds with your phone. Easiest way to get started. If you want to set up your own Raspberry Pi, I'd recommend looking at this repo: github.com/Nachtzuster/...

Brooke Raboutou, a young climber, holds a backswing on Excalibur, a 5.15c route in Italy. Brooke is wearing climbing pants and a blue shirt; her hair is a braid and a red rope is tied to her harness. The route is about 40 degrees from vertical, and you can see bolts on it

So a couple days ago, Brooke Raboutou climbed Excalibur, a 5.15c/9b+ sport climbing route in Italy. In the process, she became the first woman to climb 5.15c.

This is a monumental achievement that hasn't gotten a lot of attention outside of climbing. Let me explain why it's a big fucking deal.

Trump slaps tiny African kingdom of Lesotho with highest tariff of all The tiny southern African kingdom of Lesotho has been hit with a 50% reciprocal trade tariff by U.S. President Donald Trump, the highest levy of any single state on his long list of target economies.

I lived in this country "that no one has ever heard of" for a year. This is disastrous.

www.reuters.com/world/africa...

As it is still extremely topical and one of the best examples of non-conventional approaches to #datavis, I highly recommend reading about this simulated dendrochronology (science of tree rings) of US immigration, where each year in US history is a tree ring: pmcruz.com/dendrochrono...

Chart of mercury contamination levels at sediment sample points around the Veolia landfill

Global Witness commissioned sediment samples around the Veolia landfill. All four showed mercury contamination levels that exceeded quality guidelines, as visualised here:

Footage shows Veolia pump pollutants into protected wetlands French multinational Veolia could be risking health impacts including birth defects by pumping toxins from a large landfill into protected wetlands in Colombia

Secretly filmed footage shows French multinational Veolia pumping toxic pollutants into protected Colombian wetlands, a new investigation by Global Witness reveals:

globalwitness.org/en/campaigns...

Shell plans more cuts to costs and spending but hands CEO bigger bonus Increase in pay package comes despite fall in profits and as oil company watered down pledge to cut emissions

🚨 NEW: Shell's CEO has bagged a pay rise - pocketing an obscene £8.6 million.

After a year of unprecedented climate disasters & soaring energy bills.

Planet-wrecking oil firms like Shell should be paying climate damages, not cashing in on our misery.
gwitness.org/4iJMWLw

Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions over Dakota pipeline protests, says jury Non-profit said in statement lawsuits like this aimed at ‘destroying the right to peaceful protest’

Fossil fuel companies should be forced to pay the public trillions in damages for the costs of their planetary arson. Instead they are trying to shut down one of the most important and storied environmental groups in the world. It's shameless - and it's not over. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

This was such an interesting read, especially the part about the shrinking of the atmosphere. I would be interested to know how launching satellites is regulated - can any company just start launching them given enough funding?

Pitch Wildlife and Environmental investigations to Bellingcat - bellingcat If your source material is online and public, and your story unearths something deeper about our planet, we'd love to hear from you.

Bellingcat's Environmental Investigation team is looking for story pitches that use open-source investigation techniques to investigate environmental issues. We offer payment for stories, so if you've been working on a story and want to get paid, look here:
www.bellingcat.com/uncategorize...

Both are fine, one is American English, the other is British English

Yes, you're right, it will be interesting to see how this will develop throughout the year.

This is the Raspberry Pi setup. It's attached to a microphone on the outside that records bird sounds (and only that!). The sounds are classified using BirdNet (birdnet.cornell.edu), a popular bird classification machine learning model.

Since I'm working on my #datavisualization skills, I made a few charts to visualize this data.

The house sparrow clearly takes the win for the noisiest bird.

My dad loves birds. So last November, we installed a microphone attached to a @raspberrypi.com with a bird sound classifier in our small garden in Heidelberg, Germany.

It's been identifying every bird noise ever since. Here's the data so far:

Defense Against Dishonest Charts This is a guide to protect ourselves and to preserve what is good about turning data into visual things.

Dishonest charts are coming from all directions, and they're only going to hit harder. Unless we push back. So, an interactive guide: Defense Against Dishonest Charts flowingdata.com/projects/dis...

A new investigation by Global Witness reveals TikTok and X recommend more right-leaning than left-leaning political content to non-partisan German users.

Read about it here:

techcrunch.com/2025/02/19/s...

Or read the full report here:

www.linkedin.com/posts/global...

I used the Google Earth Engine Python API to obtain images from NASA's Landsat 9 mission and mapped shortwave infrared light as red, near-infrared light as green and green light as blue. If you are interested in the code or have feedback, let me know. (Note: this is a personal project).

I used a combination of spectral bands that highlight burned areas and changes in soil moisture.

The red spots in the 2025 image are areas affected by the recent wildfires. The cyan-colored spots in the 2024 image are peaks covered by snow in the Tehachapi mountains.

Satellite image of Los Angeles in January 2025

Satellite image of Los Angeles in January 2024

Remote sensors pick up light that is not visible to the human eye. If we map them to visible channels, we see things we would otherwise not see. These two images from NASA's satellite program Landsat show Los Angeles and its surrounding area in January 2024 and in January 2025.

The number of options for government coalitions in the upcoming German election heavily depends on how many smaller parties reach the five-percent threshold. We analyzed 50.000 elections to visualize this effect using animated kernel density plots 🤓 (text in 🇩🇪)
www.zeit.de/politik/deut...

"ChatGPT, please summarize this 4955-word deep research report in a single paragraph"

just tried it, it's great!

🧐 Are you a journalist who wants to learn more about investigating finance in climate-related issues?
📆 You have until the end of this week — 2 Feb 2025, 23:59GMT – to apply for a new and #free online training programme for European journalists: tcij.org/initiative/d... @tcij.org

How mining threatens Indigenous defenders in the Philippines | Global Witness With skyrocketing global demand for critical minerals – vital to the green energy transition – Indigenous groups and biodiversity are at risk in the Philippines

Our research shows that more than a quarter of the land used to mine critical minerals in the #Philippines clashes with Indigenous land or biodiversity zones. www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns...

YouTube video by Al Jazeera English Philippines nickel mining: Activists warn of threat to protected forests

Nickel mining is spreading fast across the Philippines, imperiling communities and protected forests. Here I talk about our latest report and why the global energy transition can't come at the expense of people and planet www.youtube.com/watch?v=m414...

Wow

Question for open data or geospatial folks: we've digitised some maps on PDFs from a govt site. We'd like to make the shapefiles available on GH. Our lawyer is trying to work out whether our ownership of the intellectual property is sufficient for that. Can anyone point to guidance that might help?