Research across natural resource management disciplines has identified an implementation gap between researchers and managers, where institutional norms and practices limit the application and synthesis of novel data and observations in decision-making. With their increasing social media and internet presence, federal agencies have grown their communication portfolios past traditional communication...
Programmers spend a substantial fraction of their debugging time by navigating
through source code, yet little is known about how programmers navigate. With the
continuing growth in size and complexity of software, this fraction of time is likely to
increase, which presents challenges to those seeking both to understand and...
The USDA Forest Services' actions have come under greater scrutiny by a public that has become increasingly concerned with the legality of their actions. Often, challenges involve the quality of science used in the decision-making. Congress has mandated that the agency use the "best available science" in its decision making...
The design of programming tools is slow and costly. To ease this process, we have developed a design pattern catalog aimed at providing guidance about how to design tools for developers. This guidance is grounded in Information Foraging Theory (IFT), which empirical studies have shown to be useful for understanding...
Natural resource decisions require consideration at many levels, ranging from how one invertebrate will be affected by a nearby road, to how an entire watershed will be transformed by a massive clearcut. Considerations reach farther than just the local ecological community-human communities, economies, and future impacts on the communities and...
The VISualization of Terrestrial and Aquatic Systems (VISTAS) software development project began with the proposition that visualization would increase the ability of scientists to explore and communicate their data, especially complex datasets that span multiple spatial and temporal scales. A case study of VISTAS articulates how and why scientists intend...