SCGIS Webinar: Interactive Applications for Marine Conservation

Ben demonstrates and elaborates on interactive applications for data-driven storytelling of marine biodiversity and exploration of tradeoffs with human activities in the ocean:

•   Routing – Route ships to minimize risk of striking a whale.

•   Siting – Minimize impacts of offshore wind to birds in space and whales in time.

•   Uses – Flag competing ocean uses for early mitigation when siting offshore renewable energy (wind, wave, tidal).

•   eDNA – Visualize environmental DNA across dimensions of taxonomy, space and time.

•   Infographics – Describe complex ecological interactions by linking interactive elements of an ecosystem to time series data.

•   Explorer – Extract maps and time series plots of data globally using OBIS observational records and satellite data (temperature, chlorophyll, seascapes).

These applications are distributed across projects with Duke’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab (Routing, Siting), the National Renewable Energy Lab (Uses), and the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (eDNA, Infographics, Explorer). The web-based interfaces are built using Shiny, an open-source, cross-platform R package and framework. The Explorer app is built using additional software (PostGIS, GeoServer) for easily spawning in the cloud (using Docker) that is part of a larger vision for regionalized applications, i.e. Marine-BON in a Box. Although these applications are marine, similar analytical approaches could easily be applied to terrestrial environments.