New geovisualization methods for supporting marine conservation planning

从运输到资源管理和健康，地理空间数据和技术现在被用于支持我们社会大多数部门的决策。然而，不断增加的数据量，复杂性和多样性需要新的方法来帮助识别，总结和可视化与决策者相关的信息，这是地理信息学，计算机科学，地理学和其他学科的许多研究项目的重点。在海洋环境中，地理空间技术成为支持海洋规划（例如海洋空间规划）的一个关键工具，更具体地说，是帮助设计和监测海洋保护区的一个关键工具。从简单使用地理信息系统（GIS）绘制不同变量，到帮助分析数据和支持决策的更复杂的方法和系统，地理空间数据和系统在海洋保护规划中发挥着越来越大的作用。虽然一系列方法和工具已经支持保护规划工作，但这些决策的复杂性很少被捕获，仍然需要新的方法。在加拿大，正在我们三大洋规划新的海洋保护区。加拿大致力于在不到5年的时间内将其海洋保护区从不到其领土沃茨的1%增加到至少10%，预计这一趋势将持续下去。这一进程需要整合大量多样的生物和社会经济数据集，并需要许多利益攸关方的参与。探讨各种人类活动（如捕鱼、石油和天然气勘探、航运、旅游业）的需要与保护脆弱和宝贵的生态系统的需要之间的权衡是这些进程的核心，这些进程往往旨在与若干不同的利益攸关方达成共识。然而，现有的方法往往只提供非常简单的方法来捕捉这些权衡，需要进行更多的研究，以设计和帮助提供方法和工具，使决策者和利益攸关方能够更好地探索替代保护方案，其各自的优势和劣势，不确定性等。拟议的研究旨在探讨用于支持其他领域决策的地理空间方法如何有助于海洋保护规划领域。具体的研究目标是：*1。制定方法，可以支持保护规划过程中的数据集的选择和使用。*2。设计和测试方法（基于决策理论领域的方法），以简单指标的形式帮助捕捉和传达生物多样性养护与海洋的社会经济利用之间的复杂权衡。3.探索如何使用地理视觉分析和GIS领域的方法来帮助监测MPA网络的全球有效性。**

From transportation to resource management and health, geospatial data and technologies are now used to support decisions in most sectors of our society. The increasing volume, complexity, and diversity of data creates however a need for new methods that can help identify, summarize, and visualize information relevant to decision-makers, something that is the focus of many research projects in geomatics, computer sciences, geography, and other disciplines. In the marine environment, geospatial technologies became a key tool supporting ocean planning (e.g. Marine Spatial Planning) and more specifically to help design and monitor marine protected areas. From simple uses of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map different variables, to more complex methods and systems that help analyzing data and supporting decisions, geospatial data and systems play an increasing role in marine conservation planning. While a range of approaches and tools already support conservation planning efforts, the complexity of those decisions is rarely captured and still calls for new methods.******In Canada, planning of new marine protected areas (MPAs) is ongoing in our three oceans. Canada is committed to increasing its MPAs from less than 1% of its territorial waters to at least 10% in less than 5 years, a trend that is expected to continue after. Such process requires the integration of large and diverse biological and socio-economic datasets and the involvement of many stakeholders. Exploring trade-offs between the need for diverse human activities (e.g. fishing, oil and gas exploration, shipping, tourism) and the need to protect fragile and valuable ecosystems is at the core of those processes that are often aiming to reach consensus with several different stakeholders. However, existing methods tend to only offer very simple ways to capture those trade-offs, and more research is required to design and help provide methods and tools that would allow decision-makers and stakeholders to better explore alternative conservation scenarios, their respective strengths and weaknesses, uncertainties, etc.******The proposed research aims to explore how geospatial approaches used for supporting decisions in other fields can contribute to the field of marine conservation planning.***Specific research objectives are to:***1. Develop methods that can support the selection and use of datasets in conservation planning processes. ***2. Design and test approaches (based on methods from the field of decision-theory) that can help capture and communicate complex trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and the socio-economic use of the oceans in the form of simple indicators.***3. Explore how methods from the field of geovisual analytics and GIS can be used to help monitor the global effectiveness of MPA networks.**