I produced a few animations for the National Wildlife Federation showing impacts of the Gulf oil spill on birds, dolphins, whales, and sea turtles that were published today on NWF’s Oil Spill site and Animal Planet’s R.O.A.R. blog.
We used wildlife data from NOAA’s Gulf Response web map (data found under BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill -> Wildlife Observations) and surface oil data from a KML posted on Google’s Oil Spill Crisis Response page. This data originally came from NOAA-NESDIS satellite imagery, available to download as images and shapefiles from an archive on their Deepwater Horizon page.
The map below is the final image of the bird deaths and injuries animation, showing a cumulative number of birds affected and the full extent of the oil spill. Just below that are the three animations, which you can also watch over on the Animal Planet blog.
