User Engagement Testing with a Pilot Decision Support Tool Aimed to Support Species Managers

Species Status Assessments (SSAs) are required to be completed for endangered species by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and focus on the resiliency, redundancy, and representation of endangered species. SSAs must include climate information since climate is a factor that will impact species in the future. To aid in including climate information, a Decision Support System (DSS) entitled Climate Analysis and Visualization for the Assessment of Species Status (CAnVAS) was developed by the State Climate Office of North Carolina (SCONC) using a co-production approach. In this study, users viewed a mockup version of the CAnVAS interface displaying a sample layout of future projections for three key climate variables (average precipitation, average maximum temperature, and occurrence of maximum temperature) at a location of interest. This assessment of the pilot version of the CAnVAS DSS was the first step in refining CAnVAS for species manager use. This research analyzed the differences in usability between two pilot versions of the CAnVAS DSS through eye-tracking and subsequent interviews with novice users. The two pilot versions of CAnVAS differed in the way data were displayed on graphs, and the color ramps used on regional maps. We found that graphically displaying temporal climate information through box and whisker plots and spatially through a sequential color ramp from white to purple was more effective than alternative displays at communicating climate information on endangered species. The results of this research will be used to further develop the CAnVAS DSS tool for future implementation.