Visualising Forest Cover Evolution in India using Python
<p>We will use python visualisations to observe trends of state-wise forest cover over the years in India</p>
<h1>Introduction</h1>
<p>India is famous for its natural diversity and one of the most contributing factor to this diversity is, its forests. From the very childhood, however, I have been reading about deforestation and how it is affecting the environment. This made me curious on delving deeper into how forest cover has evolved over the years across the Indian states.</p>
<p>For this purpose we are utilising publicly available data [1]. As the data available here is spread into different links, we are cleaning the data and combining these. This will be followed by creating visualisation using this data. Visualisations explored in this article are (a) Choropleth map animation (b) Bar chart race. Let’s start by exploring the dataset and cleaning it.</p>
<h1>Dataset</h1>
<p>After a bit of browsing, I found this <a href="https://frienvis.nic.in/Database/Forest-Cover-in-India-2021_3550.aspx#ctl00_Internalcontent" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">website</a> [1] which had time-series data on state-wise forest coverage. As expected it was not in a readily available to use format, so it required some manipulations. These manipulations majorly fall in below categories:</p>
<ol>
<li>Data is spread into 4 files (1987–2013; 2017; 2019; 2021)</li>
<li>Format of data in different sheets is not consistent</li>
<li>Some states got split during 1987–2021 such as Bihar to Bihar and Jharkhand etc.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Cleaning and combining the data</h2>
<p>Comments are provided in the script for explanation on steps</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@girish9851/visualising-forest-cover-evolution-in-india-using-python-b83f77da77ac">Click Here</a></p>