Ignoring Political Borders

This visualization uses a list of the 5,000+ latitude/longitude pairs comprising the US-Mexico border, from the Pacific coast to the Gulf of Mexico, to request data from iNaturalist, a web platform that logs observations of natural life.

iNaturalist hosts 63 million observations of 330 thousand different species. A million and a half unique observers have contributed to those observations. This application sends an API request to iNaturalist based on a GPS coordinate pair selected at random from our source list. iNaturalist returns a JSON containing data for each observation geotagged within a five-kilometer radius of the request coordinate.

This application uses D3 to map the observations to a projection and connect them with a path in chronological order. Beneath them, a fainter line traces the actual border. This project spites the concept of an impenetrable, two-sided, militarized political line by contrasting it with the chaotic, dynamic forms that emerge from mapping observations of natural life. These forms not only represent locations of plants and animals in the border regions but the locations of the humans who observe them, drawing shapes that move around and, often, across the border. It casts the natural life of the desert as a metaphor for human determination and survival in spite of hardship and predation, and the work of naturalists in the region as the opposite of the nationalist psychology and repression that infect border politics.

Hover over the large map to highlight the GPS coordinates associated with each point in the line and click to reveal the associated metadata and imagery. Click through to see the full observation on iNaturalist. The satellite image corresponds to the large map and gives an approximate place name. Click the small map to cycle through to a new coordinate. I’m Kyle Palermo and I created this project as part of the MFA Communications Design program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.