Environmental change has focused the attention of scientists, policy makers and the
wider public on the uncertainty inherent in interactions between people and the
environment. Governance in fisheries is
required to involve
stakeholder participation
and
to
be
more inclusive in its remit, which is no longer limited to ensuring a
maximum sustainable yield from a single stock but considers species and habitat
interactions, as well as social and economic issues. The increase in scope, complexity
and awareness o
f uncertainty in fisheries management has brought methodological and
institutional changes
throughout the world
. Progress towards comprehensive, explicit
and participatory risk management in fisheries depends on effective communication.
Graphic design and
data visualisation have been underu
s
ed in fisheries for
communicating science to
a
wider range of stakeholders.
In this paper,
some of the
general aspects of designing visualisations of modeling results
are discussed
and
illustrated with
examples from the
EU funded
MYFISH project
. These infographics
were tested in stakeholder workshops, and
improved through
feedback
from that 2
process
.
It is desirable to convey not just modelling results but a sense of how reliable
various models are. A survey was developed
to judge reliability of different
components of fisheries modelling: the quality of data, the quality of knowledge,
model validation efforts, and robustness to key uncertainties. The results of these
surveys were visualized for ten different models, and pr
esented alongside the main
case study.