The UW–Madison Office of Sustainability has created an interactive dashboard where users can explore trends, engage with sustainability data, and track the university’s progress. The dashboard incorporates topics such as greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, affordability, sustainability research, and campus engagement.
The goal of the Sustainability Dashboard is to display data that has been collected over the years in an accessible manner, as well as to show progress over time and provide a resource for faculty and students. The dashboard is organized into four categories: Academics, Engagement, Operations, and Planning and Administration. These categories are modeled after the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS),from which UW–Madison has received a Silver rating.
On the main landing page, users can explore each of the categories by clicking on the corresponding links. Additionally, users can examine the university’s STARS results through an interactive pie chart that summarizes the scores for each category and sub-category. Lastly, there is a section to view semesterly and yearly reports on campus sustainability and an FAQ section to learn how to navigate and use the dashboard.
Each category contains its own dashboard page where users can directly interact with the graphs by filtering the categories and hovering over a data point to obtain the exact data value. The tables are also interactive and can be sorted and searched. The graphs can be exported as visual files such as PDFs or JPEGs, and the data used for both the graphs and tables can be downloaded directly for all to explore.
If you have any questions regarding the dashboard, data reporting, or on the data itself, please feel free to reach out to Alex Frank (alex.frank@wisc.edu).