Assessing the Impact of Underwater Sound on Marine Mammal Hearing in R Shiny: Increasing Accessibility of Tools for Managers and Stakeholders

Shiny is an open source R package that provides an elegant and powerful web framework for building web applications using R. Shiny helps turn analyses into interactive web applications without requiring HTML, CSS, or... [ view full abstract ]

Shiny is an open source R package that provides an elegant and powerful web framework for building web applications using R. Shiny helps turn analyses into interactive web applications without requiring HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge. Many projects are using this application to increase accessibility of tools and knowledge between scientists, managers, and the public. One such project that has greatly benefited from this is NOAA Fisheries’ Technical Guidance for Assessing the Effects of Anthropogenic Sound on Marine Mammal Hearing. The Technical Guidance describes and provides criteria to quantify the effects of human-made sounds on marine mammal hearing. The criteria is can be used to predict the onset of permanent and temporary changes in marine mammal hearing for all underwater sound sources. Currently, an optional user spreadsheet tool created in Microsoft Excel that predicts impact calculations, based on the Technical Guidance’s criteria, has been made available for end users. However, this Microsoft Excel tool can be an overly complicated and overwhelming interface for most end users.This presentation describes how these impact calculations were translated from Microsoft Excel to R to provide a cleaner and more succinct interface for the end user. This is an example of translating complex scientific calculations and programming code into a more intuitive and management-friendly decision-making tool to predict the impacts of anthropogenic sound on marine mammal hearing.