Taken from the book *Knowledge is Beautiful* by David McCandless (HarperCollins 2014) https://geni.us/IIB-KIB
This is an extraordinary and completely original visualization. I love it.
Great visual! Would you mind providing some details about the tools you used to make it?
Edit: Thank you!
So you’re saying there’s as much water inside insects as there is in all the world’s rivers? Isn’t that horrifying.
In good news, that’s the amount of water humans use (per year?), so we could just get all our water from insects if we wanted.
Great illustration.
I understand a great deal of agricultural water use is for animal feed too — grains to feed cows primarily.
I like the aesthetic but some critical information is lost. The area of the circles within each set are proportional to the percentage in that set, but not between sets. The “73% agriculture” circle is about the same size as the “69% ice caps & snow” circle, but the actual values are very very different. The issue is trying to show values that vary across many magnitudes in the same graphic. Not easy.
It’s both interesting and also very aesthetically pleasing, but I’m not sure why the “used by humans” breakdown and the “organisms” breakdown are precisely the same colour. To my mind, they should be distinct.
Finally… Data is Beautiful.
Great information and visually appealing. It would be nice to have both the overall and subgroup percentages for each breakout to avoid confusion.
The %’s for Fresh Water are summing more than 100%
Are all other macroscopic land animals outside of humans, cows, and insects negligible? Pretty wild
We need to cut all agriculture and start eating bugs.
“to dilute pollution”
that’s some kind of homeopatic way to deal with pollution
Not enough love here this was sweet
First beautiful chart I’ve seen on here in many months, very well done!
I think ice cap/snow should have a downstream to rivers, as alot of rivers are sourced from snow melt and glaciers.
Would think the Great Lakes would hold more of the fresh water.
17 comments
**sources** US Geological Survey, Food & Agriculture Org of the United Nations (FAO) & others
https://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html
https://www.fao.org/aquastat/en/overview/methodology/water-use
**data** https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mwfxv5ttD3Elo03w-dEWhzkBduLqkwJ_bSADLX0Gm0A/edit?gid=7#gid=7
**tools** hand drawn in Adobe Illustrator
Taken from the book *Knowledge is Beautiful* by David McCandless (HarperCollins 2014) https://geni.us/IIB-KIB
This is an extraordinary and completely original visualization. I love it.
Great visual! Would you mind providing some details about the tools you used to make it?
Edit: Thank you!
So you’re saying there’s as much water inside insects as there is in all the world’s rivers? Isn’t that horrifying.
In good news, that’s the amount of water humans use (per year?), so we could just get all our water from insects if we wanted.
Great illustration.
I understand a great deal of agricultural water use is for animal feed too — grains to feed cows primarily.
I like the aesthetic but some critical information is lost. The area of the circles within each set are proportional to the percentage in that set, but not between sets. The “73% agriculture” circle is about the same size as the “69% ice caps & snow” circle, but the actual values are very very different.
The issue is trying to show values that vary across many magnitudes in the same graphic. Not easy.
It’s both interesting and also very aesthetically pleasing, but I’m not sure why the “used by humans” breakdown and the “organisms” breakdown are precisely the same colour. To my mind, they should be distinct.
Finally… Data is Beautiful.
Great information and visually appealing. It would be nice to have both the overall and subgroup percentages for each breakout to avoid confusion.
The %’s for Fresh Water are summing more than 100%
Are all other macroscopic land animals outside of humans, cows, and insects negligible? Pretty wild
We need to cut all agriculture and start eating bugs.
“to dilute pollution”
that’s some kind of homeopatic way to deal with pollution
Not enough love here this was sweet
First beautiful chart I’ve seen on here in many months, very well done!
I think ice cap/snow should have a downstream to rivers, as alot of rivers are sourced from snow melt and glaciers.
Would think the Great Lakes would hold more of the fresh water.