In this special report for CNN, Nell Lewis, Woojin Lee, and Carlotta Dotto explain the journey birds make in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, one of the world’s eight flyways and the most threatened by human development and climate change.

They mix beautiful photography, audio, video footage, charts, and maps to explain to readers the perils birds face along the path, resulting in populations declining. It’s a stunning piece that compels people to become part of the solution.

What are we seeing in the first images released by NASA’s Webb telescope, the world’s most powerful telescope? Joel Achenbach and Aaron Steckelberg have collaborated on this Washington Post piece to help non-astrophysicists understand what we’re gazing at in the pictures. Designer Garland Potts gives a cosmic tour through scroll-linked interactions, focusing the reader’s attention on individual galaxies, stars, and other elements and providing contextual information.

For this NYT Opinion piece, Daniel Griffin and Nathaniel Lash have become the storytellers of trees residing in threatened old-growth forests in the American Southwest.

The article has an amazing tree ring visualization that shows a tree’s life from 1538 to 2021. The thickness of the rings documents the amount of rainfall in a particular year. Recently, these rings have been either extremely thin or non-existent, displaying signs of struggling to survive the megadroughts created by climate change.

French journalist Pierre Breteau has visualized how June and July have shattered heat records across France. Multiple steps charts from different cities depict how temperatures have risen in the last 20 years. The figures show that dangerous heat waves are becoming the norm rather than the exception.

The USA TODAY graphics team has put together a sobering visual timeline of the school shooting that took the lives of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. The team included body camera videos, surveillance footage and ongoing reports to present what happened at Robb Elementary. It serves as a tragic yet important story that “guides you through the missteps, the horror and the heartbreak of the day.”