Mapping the Mammals of AMNH's Dioramas

One of my responsbilities as a Helen Fellow at AMNH was leading a team of six brilliant high school interns. The interns would come to the museum twice a week, for the entirety of the 2016-17 school year. The purpose of the internship was to support the larger ongoing "evolutionary tree" efforts at the museum by connecting natural science, code, and interactive design.

The museum is home to over 200 scientists, a large portion of them specialize in evolutionary biology. The interns collaborated with the Science Visualization Group, a team at the museum who is tasked with taking ongoing scientific research and communicating it to the public in interesting and compelling ways. Due to the large number of scientists researching evolution, a lot of the research the Science Visualization Group communicates involves evolutionary trees.

The culminating project for the interns was a visualization of all of the museum's extant mammals. We collected the scientific names for all of the mammal species found in the museum's dioramas, and researched their conservation status. We then collaborated with mammalogist Angelo Soto-Centeno who createed a tree that mapped their evolutionary relationships. The app was built with jQuery and d3 and served as a prototype projected on a touch table for visitors. The project was a prototype, and was shown at Family Night 2017, a public program event for families at AMNH. Below is a walk through of the prototype experience:

After the user enters the experience, they land on the view of a radial evolutionary tree with the names of all of the extant mammals in the museum's dioramas. They have the option to explore relationships by the different museum halls if they click on the leftmost button.

A drop down appears and the user can select their favorite hall at the museum.

In this user case, the user selected "Hall of African Mammals" in purple. The subset of the mammals found in that hall highlights in the tree according to color. The user can make connections between geography and the evolutionary relationship of those mammaps.

The user can also explore the conservation status for these mammals by toggling the left top button labeled "Conservation Status". This will trigger a visual dot that appears next to the names of the mammals. From "vulnerable" to "critically endgangered" and even "extinct in the wild".

The user can also click on the name of the mammal to learn more about its conservation status. They will see a picture of the mammal in the museum's diorama.

It was very rewarding to see young museum visitors explore the tree in our visualization. Most rewarding was observing them make connections between conservation and evolution, as well as break through misconceptions commonly held about evolution.