Connecting Communities Through Data, Visualizations & Decisions Visualization for Terrestrial and Aquatic Systems (VISTAS)
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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 computer science 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 better understand how terrain affects ecological processes. VISTAS also provides animations over time, fly-throughs, and analytics. Visualizing natural phenomena with VISTAS helps scientists build better models and formulate hypotheses for remote sensing and model data. Working through a co-production process, the developers, environmental scientists, and social scientists helped articulate, develop, and test visualizations that explored ecological impacts across time and space on complex landscapes. As VISTAS was refined to meet basic visualization needs, users started to restate and reprioritize desirable features including the integration of non-spatial displays of data analytics, specifically linear regression and principle component analysis (PCA). This shifted the original objective of the VISTAS software as primarily a visualization tool for visually exploring and communicating results to a tool that provided statistical output displayed alongside visualized landscape(s). Ultimately, 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 and the broader community.
This NSF/CISE/CPS project Connecting Communities Through Data, Visualizations, and Decisions brings together computer and social scientists with ecologists and environmental scientists who work with decision makers on problems such as climate change impacts and land use change. Our collaborators increasingly work with decision makers and stakeholders to jointly produce information for later use in decisions—in knowledge co-production. We use social science methods to study how software developers, environmental scientists, and decision makers create new technology (in particular visualization) to co-develop models to explore the complex problems in the local context. To that end, we partnered with three projects where environmental scientists are working with. One goal of the VISTAS project is to address our collaborators’ expanding needs for easy-to-produce and effective visual analytics of large complex data sets. Our primary research questions include:
- How do negotiations between user needs and technological capacity shape the type of tools developed and implemented?
- How do tools impact scientific results and community responses to critical ecological challenges?
We utilize a pre/post-test case study design to measure the impacts of project involvement on participants. In our research, we find that while visualizations are critical for communicating information to stakeholders, they appear to be equally critical in helping scientists understand data in complex systems, particularly those that are topographically complicated. Co-production among environmental scientists and software developers is a viable, although resource-intensive way to produce visualizations with participants having increased confidence in the visualized information. This has general implications to areas where confidence in scientific information is low. Project collaborators report that VISTAS is significantly easier to use and faster than other software that performs similar visualization functions. As collaborators have became more comfortable with VISTAS output and processes, their requests to software developers were increasingly sophisticated, over time becoming true co-developers.
Submitted by Denise Lach
on
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 computer science 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 better understand how terrain affects ecological processes. VISTAS also provides animations over time, fly-throughs, and analytics. Visualizing natural phenomena with VISTAS helps scientists build better models and formulate hypotheses for remote sensing and model data. Working through a co-production process, the developers, environmental scientists, and social scientists helped articulate, develop, and test visualizations that explored ecological impacts across time and space on complex landscapes. As VISTAS was refined to meet basic visualization needs, users started to restate and reprioritize desirable features including the integration of non-spatial displays of data analytics, specifically linear regression and principle component analysis (PCA). This shifted the original objective of the VISTAS software as primarily a visualization tool for visually exploring and communicating results to a tool that provided statistical output displayed alongside visualized landscape(s). Ultimately, 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 and the broader community.
This NSF/CISE/CPS project Connecting Communities Through Data, Visualizations, and Decisions brings together computer and social scientists with ecologists and environmental scientists who work with decision makers on problems such as climate change impacts and land use change. Our collaborators increasingly work with decision makers and stakeholders to jointly produce information for later use in decisions—in knowledge co-production. We use social science methods to study how software developers, environmental scientists, and decision makers create new technology (in particular visualization) to co-develop models to explore the complex problems in the local context. To that end, we partnered with three projects where environmental scientists are working with. One goal of the VISTAS project is to address our collaborators’ expanding needs for easy-to-produce and effective visual analytics of large complex data sets. Our primary research questions include:
- How do negotiations between user needs and technological capacity shape the type of tools developed and implemented?
- How do tools impact scientific results and community responses to critical ecological challenges?
We utilize a pre/post-test case study design to measure the impacts of project involvement on participants. In our research, we find that while visualizations are critical for communicating information to stakeholders, they appear to be equally critical in helping scientists understand data in complex systems, particularly those that are topographically complicated. Co-production among environmental scientists and software developers is a viable, although resource-intensive way to produce visualizations with participants having increased confidence in the visualized information. This has general implications to areas where confidence in scientific information is low. Project collaborators report that VISTAS is significantly easier to use and faster than other software that performs similar visualization functions. As collaborators have became more comfortable with VISTAS output and processes, their requests to software developers were increasingly sophisticated, over time becoming true co-developers.