“How’s Shelby the Turtle today?” Strengths and Weaknesses of Interactive Animal-Tracking Maps for Environmental Communication

Interactive wildlife-tracking maps on public-facing websites and apps have become a popular way to share scientific data with the public as more conservationists and wildlife researchers deploy tracking devices on animals. Environmental organizations engage with the public for a variety of reasons: to raise awareness of environmental causes, build relationships with potential partners, and encourage people to take political and personal actions. However while there is a large body of work comparing different media strategies for environmental communication goals, the effectiveness of interactive data visualizations for these purposes remains unclear. This work examines the strengths and weaknesses of interactive wildlife-tracking maps for environmental communication. We interview conservationists about their aspirations for using these maps with their own data, and conduct a study gauging lay users’ reactions to different designs. Many conservationists aspire to create deep, immersive user engagements with these maps—letting users relate to data-driven stories about individual animals and freely explore the nuances of the tracking data. Our findings show potential for the most highly-motivated users to deeply engage with these data and stories, but more casually-interested audiences struggle with the maps’ complexities. However for casual audiences, wildlife tracking maps can still superficially but effectively showcase the organizations’ work to protect the species; perhaps inspiring hope for their future, attracting audiences to other communication channels to learn more, and adding to the organizations’ credibility. Following these insights, we present a set of design considerations for further development of similar wildlife-tracking map applications; emphasizing their needs for user onboarding, context for data interpretation, and integration with relatable media.