Weevil Viewer: An interactive mapping application for geographic and phenological exploration of Wisconsin's primitive weevils

Abstract

Geographically referenced faunal surveys are essential for land managers, conservation biologists, and entomologists to understand the distribution and diversity of organisms in the landscape. Further, the provision of faunal surveys through online and interactive mapping tools may generate new insights into species occurrence and location, ultimately leading to better informed decisions about how best to manage these species and their habitats. With these considerations in mind, we developed Weevil Viewer, an online, interactive mapping application for displaying the results of a faunal survey conducted on the four primitive weevil families found in Wisconsin. Design of Weevil Viewer was informed by Shneiderman's information seeking mantra, providing a pair of map overviews that can be filtered or zoomed iteratively by species, location, and time to glean new insights into the faunal distribution and diversity as well as to identify potential sites for future surveys. Weevil Viewer continues to be populated with new survey information and serves as a proof-of-concept application that can be extended to support the visual exploration of other biodiversity surveys. © 2014 © 2014 Julia Janicki.