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Research Technical Report

Communicating Ecological Status with Interactive Infographics

Best, B.D., J. Brown, T. Murray, S. Kim, C. Caldow, P. Spector, J. Ranganathan, E. Spooner, G. Canonico, E.M. Herrera, and F. Muller- Karger (November 2020)

Oral presentation at the Western Society of Naturalists Annual Meeting, November 5-8, 2020, Virtual Meeting

ABSTRACT

In order to inform timely management and communicate to a wide audience, indicators of marine ecological status and trends should be made available in a readily accessible format and updated as soon as newer data becomes available. Initially as a Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) project serving the Florida Keys and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries, we developed an interactive infographic framework (using D3 JavaScript, R and Rmarkdown software) to link elements (e.g., species, climate and human) in an ecosystem illustration to popup windows of interactive maps and time series, which are automatically updated based on the latest available data. The websites are hosted by Github and updated using the Github Actions – all of which is free for a reasonably sized website (‹ 1 GB) and minimal computation for updating (‹ 1 hr). We are expanding this product to other sanctuaries and NOAA’s Integrated Ecosystem Assessment program. All software is free to use and code is open-source.

Reviewed: September 08, 2023
Web Site Owner: National Ocean Service

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