The Triangle of Sustainability (in German “Dreieck der Nachhaltigkeit”) by  Thomas Bartoscheck and Tomi Kauppinen and their big team from the Institute for Geoinformatics at the University of Münster is a project which was awarded 8000€ and a second place  in Wissenschaft interaktiv 2012, June 2–6, 2012, Lübeck, Germany.

 

The Triangle of Sustainability is an interactive show to explore observations about deforestation of rainforests and related phenomena such as road networks, political situation, and market prices of agricultural products on maps and timelines.  The Triangle thus connects three important aspects–ecological, economical and social–of sustainability. By doing this the Triangle serves as a show of what is achievable by  interconnecting different scientific assets via the Linked Science approach. The goal is to raise the awareness, and understanding of different factors of sustainability. The Triangle thus serves as an example of how the research field of Geoinformatics, and more generally Geographic Information Science can serve the society in these tasks.

For example, Figure 1 shows how populations of Brazilian states are  depicted by the height of the pillars, and accumulated deforestation rate is indicated with colors: with green the least amount, and with red the highest amount of observed change. In Figure 2 the deforestation rates are plotted with color (darker color means more deforestation), and height of the pillars indicate the GDP of the given municipality in the Brazilian Amazon.

Figure 2: Comparing GDP vs. deforestation rates.