Interactive Visualization to Reveal Activity Patterns of Marine Mammals and Boat Traffic in the St. Lawrence Estuary in Quebec, Canada
Date
2013-05-16
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Abstract
Intensive human activities of commercial shipping, ferries, and tourism have posed cumulative threats to the marine mammals in the St. Lawrence Estuary. In order to understand and quantify the exposure of marine mammals to visiting traffic, an agent-based model was built to simulate the behaviour of whales and boats in a portion of the St. Lawrence Estuary, which covers the Saguenay-Saint Lawrence Marine Park and the proposed Saint Lawrence Estuary Marine Protected Area. This model serves as a decision support tool to test the impact of various zoning and regulatory scenarios proposed by the Park’s managers. The objective of this research was to design and implement an interactive Geovisualization software program to manage the large datasets in volumes generated by the agent-based model to reveal, demonstrate and explore the potential activity patterns of marine mammals and boat traffic. This module includes two main components: the Database Module and the Application Module. The Database Module was designed using a standard general-purpose relational database management system. Through an interactive visual user interface, the Application Module offers a series of functionalities to visualize the results of users’ queries at both aggregate and disaggregate level. This software successfully allows the agent-based model to demonstrate the activity patterns of boat traffic and marine mammals by: 1) integrating many interactive dimensions at the same time while avoiding the interpretative complexity of multivariate pattern generalization or recognition methods, 2) verifying if the simulated patterns have a good fit with the real world, 3) allowing the Park’s managers to perform exploratory analysis for testing their regulation scenarios, and 4) providing a visual spatial support to aid spatial decision making process regarding the sustainable management of the Marine Park.
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Citation
Zheng, B. (2013). Interactive Visualization to Reveal Activity Patterns of Marine Mammals and Boat Traffic in the St. Lawrence Estuary in Quebec, Canada (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26607