Abstract

The Caribbean Challenge Dashboard, a tool for tracking conservation goals
Track: Ocean, Coastal, and Marine Resources
Authors: George Raber, Steven Schill, John Knowles

The Caribbean Challenge is a region wide campaign to protect marine resources. One of the main goals of this initiative is to create and expand marine protected areas to encompass at least 20% of coastal areas within the Caribbean region by 2020. To monitor progress toward this goal, The Nature Conservancy working with University of Southern Mississippi has created a web-map application. The data structure allows the web application to quickly break down complex stratifications of the marine space in the Caribbean by allowing users to query the degree to which goals are being met in different ecosystems, political units and others and then visualize the results of their queries on the map and in tabular format. The data are published as web services using ArcGIS for Server. This presentation discusses in further detail the architecture of the web application, and the elements that have made it a successful tool.