Data journalism
analysis + visualizations
Nature in flames: two decades of wildfires in Venezuela’s protected areas - Español
Prodavinci analyzed twenty years of NASA’s satellite data to understand wildfire behavior in all of Venezuela’s natural protected areas, —including 44 national parks, 21 natural monuments, seven wildlife refuges, seven wildlife reserves and one wildlife sanctuary,— a surface equivalent to 24% of the country territory. This project combined over 3 million hotspots detected by NASA’s MODIS and VIIRS sensors, satellite imagery, and five georeferenced spatial databases, to understand the location, clustering and date of wildfires, their proximity to human settlements, roads, mines and other infrastructure, the type of vegetation and ecosystem affected, and other relevant variables. It was the first project to systematically analyze wildfires in Venezuela.
As one of the ten most biodiverse countries on earth, Venezuela does not maintain official or public information on the state of its natural protected areas - including wildfires. Government opacity and mobility restrictions during the covid-19 pandemic, led us to develop a novel methodology in collaborationg with experts, researchers and academics, in order to understand what is happening with wildfires in our country’s most important megadiverse areas.
Some of our findings:
In 2020 Venezuela was the country in the Amazon region with the highest density of fires — almost double that of Brazil.
2020 was the worst year for Venezuela’s protected areas on record.
Since 2001 wildfires have increased in 63 out of 80 protected areas in the country.
In Trujillo’s Teta de Niquitao Natural Monument, which protects part of the Andean mountain range, wildfires increased 262% from one decade to the next. It is the biggest increase in all of Venezuela’s natural protected areas.
Seven out of the top20 areas with most wildfire density are located in the northern region of the country. This region has the highest population density and also concentrates most of Venezuela’s industrial activity.
Arístides Rojas Natural Monument in Guárico state, which protects 80-million-year-old reef limestone hills, is the protected natural area with the highest density of fires in Venezuela. Of all the fires from 2012 to 2020, half were concentrated on the border with San Juan de los Morros, the city with the highest population density in the state. We detected at least 430 illegal invasions within Arístides Rojas using satellite imagery and calculated that around 4.5% of the natural monument's territory was intervened by 2021.
Aguaro-Guariquito National Park, which encompasses a microcosm of the Llanos ecosystems, is the largest Protected Area north of the Orinoco river. It also registers the highest number of hotspots and it is the third area with the highest wildfire density. This park is home to critically endangered species such as the Orinoco crocodile (Crocodylus intermedius). Almost half of the fires detected between 2012 and 2020 occurred in 11% of the territory, on the riparian forests, the only forest ecosystem in the park.
Caura National Park protects part of the Venezuelan Amazon rainforest, and it’s located in Bolívar and Amazonas states. In 2020 it had 38% more fires than its average for the last nine years. Created by Nicolas Maduro in 2017 amidst controversy, its northern limits overlap with the Orinoco Mining Arc, an area spanning 12% of the country’s territory designated by the government for mining activities. Since its foundation, 75% of all fires in the park have concentrated within this overlapping area. Upon further analysis we found that most hotspots coincided with agricultural and livestock farming inside the national park. Using satellite imagery and hotspots as a proxy for human activity, we detected 13 illegal mines within the National Park that had not been previously identified.
The National Park Institute, the institution responsible for managing National Parks and Natural Monuments, does not currently have annual operating plans for fire management. It also does not produce final reports on the fire season.
This piece was part of Prodavinci’s “Incendios en Venezuela” a project made possible by the support of the Rainforest Journalism Fund, in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center for Journalism.
Production, data analysis, geographic information systems and text by Helena Carpio. Published May 11, 2021.
Inequality and covid-19: Distances to sentinel treatment centers in Venezuela - English & Español
Prodavinci analyzed the location of sentinel centres, 46 public health centers designated by the Venezuelan government to treat covid-19 patients, and found important inequalities in their distribution. The distance between a covid-19 patient and the health center is associated with mortality: people further away from treatment have a higher risk of dying. And yet, half of the Venezuelan population has to drive between 6 and 187 miles to reach a sentinel center. The government’s center distribution does not respond to population density or health infrastructure.
Because of the lack of demographic, health and covid-19 public data, we had to geolocate treatment centers and combine five different geospatial databases - including remote sensing data, voter registry records and census data - to identify the cities and counties with less access to specialized public healthcare for covid-19 in Venezuela.
We used geographic information systems (GIS) software to find the distance to the nearest treatment center for 80 cities and 11,432 communities, providing a national and demographic map of the government’s arbitrary covid-19 center allocation.
This piece was part of Prodavinci’s “COVID-19 Strikes a Country in Crisis: Dispatches From Venezuela” Project for the Pulitzer Center covid-19 grant.
Produced by Helena Carpio. Published September 10, 2020.
¿Qué nos dicen los satélites sobre incendios en Caracas y Miranda? - Español
En lo que va de 2020 Venezuela es el país con más incendios de Sudamérica, según datos del Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Espaciales de Brasil (INPE). El 36% de los incendios registrados en el continente hasta abril han ocurrido en Venezuela. En los primeros 14 días de abril de 2020 se quemaron cerca de 289 kilómetros cuadrados en el Distrito Capital y Miranda, un espacio equivalente a la ciudad de Valencia, incluyendo sus 14 parroquias o 22 veces el municipio Chacao. En esas dos semanas hubo la misma cantidad de incendios que en todo el mes de abril de 2012, 2013, 2014 y 2015, combinados.
Este trabajo explainer con visualizaciones interactivas analizó veinte años de data de incendios registrada por dos instrumentos satelitales de la Agencia Espacial Norteamericana (NASA), MODIS y VIIRS, para Caracas y la región capital.
Dirigido por Helena Carpio. Publicado el 24 de abril de 2020.
La escala de malaria en Venezuela
Los casos de paludismo en Venezuela aumentaron 886% en diez años. Casi 16 millones de personas estuvieron en riesgo de contagiarse en zonas endémicas del país, según el reporte mundial de malaria de 2018 de la Organización Mundial de la Salud. Al menos 456 pacientes murieron en 2017 de paludismo, estimó la OMS. El gobierno venezolano no publica la tasa de mortalidad por malaria desde hace cinco años.
Dirigido por Valentina Oropeza. Publicado el 8 de agosto de 2019.
Las horas oscuras
Venezuela vivió tres apagones masivos en marzo de 2019: fue la primera vez que casi todo el país quedó sin luz por varios días. El gobierno implementó un plan de racionamiento eléctrico en abril. Prodavinci calculó que 60% de los venezolanos viven en parroquias sujetas a racionamiento formal. Identificamos que 241 centros educativos están racionados y 158 pierden el equivalente a una semana de clases al mes. De los 196 centros de salud que aparecen en el plan, 42 pasan el equivalente a más de tres días sin electricidad al mes.
Dirigido por Luisa Salomón. Publicado el 27 de mayo de 2019.
Tenemos que hablar de la Asamblea Nacional
El 6 de diciembre de 2015 Venezuela eligió por primera vez desde 1999 una Asamblea Nacional con mayoría opositora. Prodavinci identificó 106 sentencias del Tribunal Supremo de Justicia que afectan y limitan las funciones de la Asamblea Nacional. La inmunidad parlamentaria de veintiún diputados ha sido comprometida por el TSJ. Este trabajo recopila las acciones del Poder Ejecutivo, Electoral, Judicial y Ciudadano que han afectado al Poder Legislativo.
Dirigido por Luisa Salomón. Publicado el 30 de julio de 2019.
Flying from Venezuela: A crisis in numbers (2013 - May 2018)
Since 2013, Venezuela has lost 42,149 weekly seats in international airlines, a 74% decrease. In the past five years, 19 out of 32 foreign airlines have left the country.
This interactive data piece explores Venezuela’s increasing air traffic isolation.
Produced by Yorman Guerrero. Published May 2, 2018.