Ecosystem Dashboard

Questions the current subtidal map answers:

When and where have we surveyed?

How does mean density of taxon-x vary across our sites for year-x?

How does the mean density of taxon-x vary over time?

How does the min/max/average size of fish-x vary at a particular site?

Which species were found on year-x and what were their relative densities?

How does the mean density of species-a and species-b compare at a particular site over time?

Other questions we could answer and features to implement

How does species richness vary across sites on a particular year, or over all years?

This could be displayed on the map in exactly the same way as mean density data. All the data needed should already be available in the current database. We could also show a plot of species richness over time on one of the info window tabs when you click on a site.

How does the size structure of a fish community vary across sites and time?

We would need the fish data in a different format than what it is in now, but that shouldn’t be difficult. These could be implemented as a bar plot for each year or a stacked-area showing changes over time.

Complementary Google Earth interface to most products

Would allow users to combine our datasets with other sources of data in google earth to do things we could never do on the map. Supporting google earth also has benefits for the code base. It means supporting multiple client types, which means better compatibility with future interfaces based on technologies such as flash, flex, apollo or silverlight

We could allow users to create a bar plot of density data across sites, as an alternative to the map view

This has been requested several times. It may be best to make all map based data displays (such as species richness) have an alternative static bar graph option. Sites could be listed from north to south, or in a specific order that we can configure. Once again, this plot could only represent one year. If we needed cumulative means for all or several years, we would run into obstacle A.

How does the mean density of a particular taxon vary across a specified list of sites?

The user could pick a specific group of sites and plot density on a bar graph like the one above. This would be easy to do for a particular year. If we wanted to plot a mean of density over all years, we would run into obstacle A

How does mean density compare over all sites and years for a given species?

In other words, show the taxon density data on the map, but as a mean for all years sampled. Would run into obstacle A

How does the mean density of one group of sites compare to another? For example, how does the density of taxon-a compare inside and outside of marine protected areas on santa cruz island?

This is the type of functionality that would make the site more "community-driven". Users could share the plots and map views they create. This comic from our first meeting explains the interaction further. This kind of interface definitely runs into obstacle A

Obstacle A

Right now the backend database for this website is a table of mean density for each site and year along with a standard error calculation. We cannot take an average of two or more of these measures and still have standard error. So we can’t take an average of all years for a site, or across sites, without losing error bars. One way to deal with this is to store the raw transect data and do calculations on it. This process would be slower, but hopefully not that much slower. It also may not work with the fish data since it has to be "depth-populated".