Abstract

Decision support tools are developed to assist coral reef managers in understanding impacts to marine resources for informed decision making. From 2010 to 2014, informational conversations, interviews, and surveys were conducted with 19 coral reef and marine resource managers in southeast Florida. These interactions were used to develop a needs assess-ment of the types of data and information needed by resource managers and a preferred design for accessing or delivering a decision support tool to end users. Three discovery prototypes were created then tested and evaluated with managers using pre/post surveys. All managers stated that the tools were moderately useful and most stated they would use the tools to sup-port decision making in the future. More importantly, the authors learned two things from project: 1) there are variations in the roles and responsibilities of resource managers such as, science data managers or project managers that can influence the use of decision support tools, and 2) resource managers may struggle with addressing far-field influences on resources, but it is important to have real-time information about the condition of the reefs to relay information to stakeholders.

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