This group of data streams situates the organism within the complex realities of human social, political, and economic systems. From the presence of indigenous territories to the distribution of safe water, these indicators represent the built and governed worlds that are inseparable from ecological questions, framing "nature" as a product of care, power, and justice.
What it does: Chooses a random country from the local JSON file and maps its annual waste generation (in kg per capita) to the particle scale, using a rawMax of 30,000 to accommodate outliers with high industrial waste.
How location is fetched: A random country is selected from the pre-compiled list in the local JSON file.
Source of the data: The data is from Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union, table cei_pc034), which includes data for EU member and candidate countries. This list is compiled by the bundler script and stored in the local all--static-data.json file.
API or JSON: JSON
Description: Waste is industrial civilization’s metabolic residue. Visualizing per-capita outputs links patterns of production and consumption directly to ecological degradation and resource depletion.
What it does: Executes an Overpass query on the OpenStreetMap database to count nodes tagged as abandoned=yes within a 20 km radius of a point. The resulting count is then mapped to the particle scale.
How location is fetched: The first attempt uses getLandBiasedCoordinates(). If this fails to find a signal, a second attempt is made by querying one of the curated locations. These sites were chosen as iconic global symbols of post-industrial decline and post-disaster abandonment, respectively.
The Complete Curated List:
This list was curated to represent a diverse and globally significant set of abandonment archetypes, ensuring the data reflects more than a single narrative of decline.
This group represents the slow, grinding decay of cities built on industrial economies that became obsolete. It is a story of economic entropy and the hollowing out of urban cores, leaving behind a vast landscape of ruins.
This archetype represents abandonment driven by ideological shifts and the redrawing of political maps.
This group includes sites abandoned not through slow decay, but through grand, systemic miscalculation.
These sites tell stories of boom-and-bust cycles tied to finite resources and the lingering skeletons of colonial economies.
These are landscapes of sudden, total abandonment forced by overwhelming events, technological or natural.
Source of the data: Overpass API (OpenStreetMap)
API or JSON: API
Description: Abandoned infrastructure marks the negative imprint of human settlement: architectures of extraction, neglect, and obsolescence. This data represent the post-industrial landscape, dereliction, surfacing ruins that could be seen as both endpoint and seedbed for nonhuman reclamations.
What it does: This stream serves as a proxy for community infrastructure by querying the OpenStreetMap database for nodes tagged as amenity=community_centre within a 10 km radius. The count is used to represent the density of potential mutual-aid activity.
How location is fetched: The first attempt uses getLandBiasedCoordinates(). On retry, it queries on curated major urban centers. These cities were selected to represent large, diverse metropolitan areas with a known history of robust community and civic organizing.
The Complete Curated List:
This list was curated to provide a globally diverse sample of major urban environments where community infrastructure is both vital and well-documented on OpenStreetMap. The goal is to capture different models of social organization.
These cities have rich histories of grassroots activism, social movements, and immigrant communities that rely on a dense network of formal community centers and informal mutual aid groups.
These cities feature a mix of state-supported social centers and autonomous, activist-run spaces. Berlin, in particular, is famous for its strong neighborhood-level ("Kiez") culture and social infrastructure.
This group ensures a non-Eurocentric perspective. Mexico City and Santiago have strong traditions of neighborhood-level organizing, often in response to state absence or political instability. Sydney represents a developed Commonwealth model of community services, while Singapore represents a highly planned city-state with a dense network of state-sanctioned community clubs and non-profit services.
Source of the data: Overpass API (OpenStreetMap)
API or JSON: API
Description: Mutual aid networks represent distributed care infrastructures. By reading civic spaces as signals of grassroots organization, the data traces how communities self-organize in the absence of centralized provision and underscores how ecology is also social: an interspecies ethic of reciprocity and support.
What it does: Executes a specific Overpass query on the OpenStreetMap database, searching for mapped ways and relations explicitly tagged as boundary=aboriginal_lands within a 50 km radius. The raw count is capped at 5 to create a stable signal of presence.
How location is fetched: The first attempt uses getLandBiasedCoordinates(). On retry, it queries globally significant indigenous territories on different continents.
The Complete Curated List:
Source of the data: Overpass API (OpenStreetMap)
API or JSON: API.
Description: Mapping indigenous territories honors place-based knowledge systems and governance models that predate and challenge colonial cartographies. This data represents plural ontologies of land stewardship and relationality, where territory is understood as kin, not commodity.
What it does: Selects a random country from the local JSON file. The value, which represents the percentage of the population living below the national poverty line, is mapped to the particle scale.
How location is fetched: Not applicable. A random country is selected from the pre-compiled list in the local JSON file.
Source of the data: The data is from the World Bank (indicator SI.POV.NAHC). This curated list is compiled by the script and stored in the local all-static-data.json file.
API or JSON: JSON
Description: Poverty data situates ecological questions within socioeconomic realities, foregrounding how environmental vulnerability and inequality are entwined. It invites systemic analysis through the lens of political ecology, linking climate resilience to resource access, and placing human precarity alongside nonhuman fragility reframing “nature” as inseparable from infrastructures of care, access, and power.
What it does: Selects a random country from the local JSON file and maps its net migration value to the particle scale, using a rawMax of 1,500,000 to handle the wide range of data.
How location is fetched: A random country is selected from the pre-compiled list.
Source of the data: The data is from the World Bank (indicator SM.POP.NETM). This curated list is compiled by the script and stored in the local all-static-data.json file.
API or JSON: JSON
Description: The data source used (SM.POP.NETM) is Net Migration, the total number of immigrants minus the total number of emigrants. The net Migration is a material consequence of conflict, resource regimes, and climate destabilization. Forced and voluntary migration are social artifacts and ecological vectors that reshuffle species assemblages, land use, and infrastructural pressures. Human flows reconfigure ecologies; ecological change forces political dispossession.
What it does: Randomly selects a country’s data from the local JSON file and maps the value (a percentage ratio) to the particle scale with rawMax: 100.
How location is fetched: A random country is selected from the pre-compiled list.
Source of the data: The data is from the World Bank (indicator SL.TLF.CACT.FM.ZS). This curated list is compiled by the script and stored in the local all-static-data.json file.
API or JSON: JSON
Description: The indicator used (SL.TLF.CACT.FM.ZS) is a specific economic metric that measures the ratio of women's participation in the labor force compared to men's. This metric makes visible the differential distribution of economic opportunity and participation. It foregrounds how infrastructures and environmental policies embody gendered assumptions. From a systems ecology perspective, it signals a social feedback loop that conditions community resilience.
What it does: Selects a country’s resource depletion value from the local JSON file and maps it to the particle scale with rawMax: 30.
How location is fetched: A random country is selected from the pre-compiled list.
Source of the data: The data is from the World Bank (indicator NY.ADJ.DRES.GN.ZS). This curated list is compiled by the script and stored in the local all-static-data.json file.
API or JSON: JSON
Description: The indicator (NY.ADJ.DRES.GN.ZS) is a complex economic measure that includes energy, mineral, and forest depletion, offset by education expenditure and damage from pollution. A higher value indicates a greater rate of depletion. It is a measure of a nation's metabolic imbalance with its environment.
What it does: Selects a country’s renewable energy percentage from the local JSON file and maps it to the particle scale with rawMax: 100.
How location is fetched: A random country is selected from the pre-compiled list.
Source of the data: The data is from the World Bank (indicator EG.FEC.RNEW.ZS). This curated list is compiled by the script and stored in the local all-static-data.json file.
API or JSON: JSON
Description: The proportion of a jurisdiction’s energy derived from renewables is a practical proxy for infrastructural transition away from fossil-fuel metabolic regimes. It directly indexes adaptive capacity and signals where socio-technical systems are being redesigned to sustain multispecies futures rather than accelerating collapse.
What it does: Selects a country’s safe water access percentage from the local JSON file and maps it to the particle scale with rawMax: 100.
How location is fetched: A random country is selected from the pre-compiled list.
Source of the data: The data is from the World Bank (indicator SH.H2O.SMDW.ZS), which aggregates data from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. This curated list is compiled by the script and stored in the local all-static-data.json file.
API or JSON: JSON
Description: This data measures how many people use safely managed drinking water services (as % of population). Access to safe drinking water is a fundamental measure of life-sustaining infrastructure and a direct indicator of environmental justice. This dataset connects hydrosocial inequalities to the resilience of both human and nonhuman communities, underscoring the political choices that make some populations more exposed to contamination or scarcity.