Exploring Geovisualization Symbology for Landscape Genetics

Landscape genetics, which considers genetic population structure in the context of spatially referenced parameters in the surrounding landscape, has been shown to be extremely useful for wildlife management. Unfortunately its widespread uptake beyond the research community is hampered due to a lack of effective communication of useable information in a suitable format for application by stakeholders such as wildlife regulators or managers. To improve the communication of suitable information, geovisualization of results should be facilitated in a comprehensible format for stakeholders without GIS or genetic expertise. Existing Web-based solutions do not provide adequate support for the visualization of multi-attribute spatially referenced genetic population structure information. As a solution, we propose an appropriate symbology to communicate landscape genetic information through the existing suite of web-based spatial software provided by the OpenGeo Stack. A full problem description, review of available technologies, development rationale, and theoretical implementation of the proposed symbology are provided.
JRC.G.4-Maritime affairs