Explain your research interactively

Interactive web applications enable your audience to gain deeper insights from your research. Go beyond the traditional readership of academic journals and share your research with technical and non-technical audiences alike. Create increased visibility, accessibility, and relevance, especially for applied science that supports stakeholder engagement and policy planning in natural resource management. 

Below we describe a project that highlights how web apps can help you to achieve the following: 

  • Develop connections with a broader audience.
  • Create a narrative to explain complex concepts through visualization.
  • Demonstrate analyses and mathematical simulations in real-time.

The Project

Our project began with provision of scientific advice for conch and lobster fishery management in Belize. After producing two peer-reviewed publications, the team’s focus shifted to a new goal of sharing this research with fishers and other stakeholders. Sharing of this work was viewed as integral to facilitate collection of additional insights from stakeholders and decision-makers. To do so, we created an interactive visual summary of key concepts and findings, which will enable practitioners to share this research with key audiences.

Project Team: Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy (TNC),  University of Miami, University of California Santa Barbara, Belize Fisheries Department, MER Consultants LLC & Vericatch.

Population dynamics modeling

Our Role

We wrote the application, including the user interface consisting of visualizations and animations and the server-side computations including population dynamics modeling. The application was created using R Shiny using Plotly and DT.

Harford, W.J., Gedamke, T., Babcock, E.A., Carcamo, R., McDonald, G., Wilson, J.R., 2016. Management strategy evaluation of a multi-indicator adaptive framework for data-limited fisheries management. Bulletin of Marine Science 92, 423–445. https://doi.org/10.5343/bms.2016.1025
 
McDonald, G., Harford, B., Arrivillaga, A., Babcock, E.A., Carcamo, R., Foley, J., Fujita, R., Gedamke, T., Gibson, J., Karr, K., Robinson, J., Wilson, J., 2017. An indicator-based adaptive management framework and its development for data-limited fisheries in Belize. Marine Policy 76, 28–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2016.11.027

Collaborators

WJ Harford