In a way, it’s the ultimate data design challenge: mapping not only the global economy, but how it impacts vanishing biodiversity on earth. Moran and Kanemoto's work traces local events, like the die-off of a species or an ecosystem, back through the global economic trade network to find its cause. Understanding a single such event is complex; understanding how thousands of them exist in a network sounds impossible. The purple-and-green dappled maps represent how American consumers impact the rest of the natural world. It’s a classic heat map, distinguishing between hotspots of threatened marine and terrestrial species. The more intense the hue, the larger the number of threats that link back to American consumers. their map shows, ecologies in poorer developing countries are often most impacted by global trade routes. Their visualization shows where that conservation should be going, not just where donors can "see" it.