Exploring the Design Space of Sankey Diagrams for the Food-Energy-Water Nexus

In this work, we define a set of design requirements relating to Sankey diagrams for supporting FoodEnergy-Water (FEW) nexus understanding, and propose the NEST diagram design, a visualization design that incorporates a number of characteristics from Sankey diagrams, treemaps, and graphs, to improve readability and minimize the negative impact of edge crossings common in traditional Sankey diagrams.