The footnote abuse is too much. A lot of the footnoted information could be easily presented in the exact same sentence, if not, a separate paragraph. It disrupts the flow of the article, as the comment above me points out.
As for the story, which is a whole separate issue of its own, it is lacklustre, almost plastic in the way it treats the characters telling it. Their interactions don’t feel authentic, because, let’s face it, no real human being holds a conversation in that manner. In other words; too cartoonish and one-dimensional, even primitive.
The diagrams were a really nice touch, I will say. Your choice of images used in the article is also nice. Though, I think it’d be better to put (at least, the ones with different flora) into an image carousel, like a collection of images a photographer took for documentation.
