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Making ecology research results useful for resource management: a case study in visual analytics

This paper addresses challenges to resource managers' use of scientific research, and reports strategies and informatics tools to ameliorate those challenges. Our work involves repurposing fundamental ecology research data for resource managers, in particular for field foresters who make decisions regarding which trees to leave when harvesting timber stands. We describe needs of managers (e.g., interpreting and implementing value statements from policy, and communicating and justifying decisions to stakeholders) and visual analytics tools and artifacts to repurpose scientific data to those needs. We conclude that visual analytics can produce successful boundary objects to overcome some challenges inherent in differences of approach between researchers and managers, but its use to repurpose data in this way will require further research and development in visual analytics and in the cognitive and social sciences. As adequate informatics tools become available to produce artifacts for repurposing scientific data, interdisciplinary collaboration among research ecologists, resource managers, and biometricians will likely still be needed to produce the artifacts. In particular, future collaboration is necessary to define and test new visual analytics in response to changing policy.