Kijani Grows: Visualizing an Urban Aquaponic Garden

Aquaponics, the portmanteau of “aquaculture” and “hydroponic”, is a sustainable food production system that combines the raising of aquatic animals such as fish in tanks (i.e. aquaculture) with the cultivation of plants in water (i.e. hydroponics) in a symbiotic environment [1]. In this paper we describe a new visualization approach that allows aquaponic gardeners to quickly monitor the status of their garden, analyze its health, and extract trends in the data, potentially to generate insight into how the unseen components of the garden behave. The design of the visualization tool is twofold: as a data dashboard, it contains an animated component that simulates the actual garden that allows the user to get a quick visual overview of the system in real time and a series of interactive line graphs that facilitate the analysis of collected data to uncover patterns and relationships. Secondly, the visualization is designed to educate a larger public about the basics of aquaponic systems. By combining visualization, interaction, animation, details on demand, and the ability to query for specific time intervals, our visualization tool interactively simulates and visualizes an aquaponic garden system in real time and proves to be very useful to both urban farmers and the general public. ACM Classification