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.
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.
Authors
WJ Harford