Connecting Communities Through Data, Visualizations, and Decisions

The VISualization of Terrestrial and Aquatic Systems (VISTAS) team, an NSF/BIO/ABI-funded collaboration among environmental-, computer-, and social-scientists, has integrated new technologies and CS research into terrain visualization software for environmental scientists. The system allows scientists to overlay 2D data onto 3D elevation maps to emphasize landscape topography and to better understand how topography affects the ecology of the land. VISTAS also provides animations over time, fly-throughs, and some analytics. Visualizing natural phenomena with VISTAS helps scientists build better models and formulate hypotheses for remote sensing and model data. The VISTAS team is now developing visualizations to better explore time-series and to exploit machine learning to categorize, explore, and analyze. Our collaborators use VISTAS visualizations both to improve their own understanding of natural phenomena and to help explain results to decision makers—in particular how questions under study impact stakeholders.
This NSF/CISE/CPS project Connecting Communities Through Data, Visualizations, and Decisions brings together computer- and social-scientists with scientists who work with decision makers on wicked problems such as climate change impacts and energy production. Our collaborators also increasingly work with decision makers and stakeholders to jointly produce information for later use in decisions—in knowledge co-production. We will use social science methods to study how software developers, environmental scientists, and decision makers together create new technology (in particular visualization) to co-develop models to explore the impact of climate change in the local context. To that end, we partner with four projects that work with decision makers on wicked problems: 1) climate change impacts at the local level (P. Ruggiero with OSU/ENVISION), 2) salmon recovery on Native Lands (B. McKane with EPA/Squaxin Island Tribes), 3) vegetation changes in the Great Basin (Bachelet with CBI/BLM), and 4) citizen opinions of nearby hydraulic fracking (H. Boudet). We aim to address our collaborators’ expanding needs for easy-to-produce and effective visual analytics of large complex data sets:
1. Climate change is possibly the most critical problem facing the planet; how can public resources be brought to bear on its impacts?
2. How do negotiations between user needs and technological capacity shape the type of tools developed and implemented?
3. How do those tools impact how scientific results are interpreted and how the communities respond to critical ecological challenges?
Case study methods, traditionally used in social and ecological research where dynamic phenomena are examined in situ, often generate theory in a developing field, which can then be tested through traditional scientific method. We will develop theory regarding: How visualization and the process of developing visualizations (or more generally, new technologies) help scientists understand their data in innovative ways and communicate that understanding, and whether distinctions between scientific visualization for scientists and non-scientists needed.
Broader impacts are anticipated for the 4 target communities, enabling better decision making regarding climate change impacts. The methods and software should generalize to other communities, decision makers and scientists, and we thus aim to disseminate how to bring about the co-production of knowledge between scientists and decision makers and so improve scientific results and foster better societal decisions. Finally, we anticipate educational impacts thorugh our work with the Enduring Legacies Native Case Studies, and enhancing and disseminating interdisciplinary curricula with our case studies.