PacIOOS Voyager: Enhancing Decision-Making for Stakeholders in the Pacific Islands

The Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System (PacIOOS) offers a flexible, interactive online map-based data visualization tool named ‘Voyager’ for stakeholders in the Pacific Islands (www.pacioos.hawaii.edu/voyager/). PacIOOS Voyager allows ocean stakeholders to dynamically combine, view, download, and query hundreds of data layers. Free to the public, this powerful, yet easy-to-use interface serves as a decision-making portal throughout the Pacific Islands. Voyager allows a diversity of users to interact with ocean and coastal data, whether recent, historical, predictions, dynamic, or static, in a map-based interface that is comfortable, understandable, and built upon the familiar Google Maps. The ability of a user to interact with many different data sets at the same time, in the same window, makes it easier to inform and make complex decisions to increase preparedness and resiliency in the islands. Furthermore, Voyager users can bookmark maps and share visualizations to document their decision making and preserve custom maps for future use and distribution. Developed in response to user feedback from researchers, agency staff, and members of the public, Voyager has grown from an experimental map tool focused on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu to a regional system that provides access to dozens of terabytes of data spanning multiple disciplines, geographies, and decades. This presentation will highlight the power of this data portal through examples of end users such as coral reef managers, researchers, and informed other ocean users.