I’ve recently been to some pretty inspiring events on data visualisation. Seeing information presented in striking, unusual and engaging ways is really exciting. There is a lot of detailed data out in the world, and a lot of different ways to make it accessible, beautiful and fun. Data visualisation skills are essential in conservation biology, a field in which communicating results to a wide audience effectively is really important.  There are a lot of info-graphics out there that immediately look exciting and then actually turn out to be confusing, or complicated and over-enthusiastically multicoloured, but luckily there’s a good number of really excellent graphics too.

Here are some of the things I’ve recently found and enjoyed looking at…

Carbon emissions by Stanford Kay, a pretty classic infographic:

An infographic history of the world by valentinadefilippo highlighting how much of life is made up of single-celled organisms:

A reimagined periodic table by stefanie posavec showing similarities between different elements:

OneZoom is an impressive (although occasionally nauseating) fractal zooming tour of the history of the natural world:

The field of commemoration and listen-to-wikipedia-being-created-in-real-time are stunning entries into last years information is beautiful awards:

http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/2013-winners/

And if enjoying the images isnt enough… there are some big pots of money out there for the winners of data-vis challenges:

http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/

http://www.visualizing.org/open-challenges