By Colin Gold
Summary
In the North Sea today, there exists a major problem related to management of plaice resources. Recently, plaice habitat has shifted North, while the fishing industry has largely continued to exploit the areas of the southern North Sea due to fuel prices and legislative restrictions. The result of this interplay of actors is the enormous bycatch of plaice individuals which are under the Minimum Landing Size, since juvenile plaice are still present in the South, while adults are located for most of the year in the central and northern regions.
If migration and life history patterns of plaice can be mutually understood through active and cooperative participation by fishermen, scientists and policymakers, the industry’s management and therefore sustainable future, can be better assured. The idea for accomplishing this is to create a GIS animation which has been constructed with input from all stakeholder groups and to compare its usability against traditional static maps. To undertake this, four different steps must be followed: the identification of stakeholder group competencies and needs; an inventory of available data; a review of visualization options for the data; and the testing of the usability of the completed visualization.
The identification of stakeholder competencies was accomplished largely through the review of available literature and already established fishery GIS applications. Data was found to be quite bountiful but the usefulness of it was questioned, as it may not suit the needs of this project. After having consulted other fishery GIS, the data to use was chosen and processed into what seemed most usable in terms of the specifications of the project. This data included Effort, Discards, and Catch. All datasets included appropriate ICES quadrants and dates.
The investigation into available visualization techniques was based on the assumption that users would be at the forefront of our focus, as this is a study in usability. Forms (cartographic variables), purpose, technology and data were all considered, always focusing on simple visualization strategies for maximum understanding. Specifications were made on the cartographic choices such as layout and data representation, as well as the decision to employ ArcGIS as the development software of our animation.
The usability analysis drew upon social and cognitive sciences and the User-Centered Design Process. Cognitive limitations were taken into account and a simple visualization which encouraged focused attention became the first prototype. It was evaluated on four criteria: users’ performance, visualization learnability, design flexibility and subjective satisfaction. The usability of the two visualizations (static maps and animation) was tested, each with a questionnaire of objective and subjective questions. The results of the tests were evaluated on time, errors made and completion percentage for objective questions, while the subjective answers were compiled and summarized. Since the stakeholders were so few in number, determining which visualization type was better was difficult.
The Discussion section of the report noted interesting conclusions. Key among them was that both visualization types were effective at answering certain types of questions but not the same. Users expressed a desire for more interactivity in the animation because as it was presented, it was not considered as usable as the static maps, particularly for learnability. Overall, the process of usability testing seemed to be a success, if understood that this is only the first iteration of the process. The flexibility of the design seemed appropriate for the limited number of participants but this must be increased in order to make firm conclusions. Another must for the visualizations is the improvement of the fishery data which was used, as the first choice dataset was not complete enough to yield a usable visualization.