Connecting efforts to protect the oceans with an audience

The Minderoo Marine Parks dashboard provides easy access to a large eDNA dataset describing the marine biodiversity and species distribution within Australia’s Marine Parks. The dashboard enables customised visualisation of biomonitoring data alongside tailored content, like case studies, to allow the audience to explore different parks and search for species they are interested in.

Technology that can keep up with the data

As part of this project our team worked closely with Minderoo’s team of scientists, including geneticists, ecologists and computational biologists to present the data in a way that is correct, clear and digestible.

Epi’s autoscaling hosting environment is used to ensure high performance at all times. 

Information design that doesn’t overwhelm

A key challenge in the development of the dashboard was finding a way to present  highly complex data and information without overwhelming the user. To achieve this, we worked closely with Minderoo, collecting feedback from key stakeholders on the initial design through to several draft versions of the dashboard. Instructional design techniques were used to develop technical summaries and interactive introductions, to give users confidence to explore the data and create engagement.

Chat with the data – using AI to answer questions about the findings

On a dedicated tab “Chat with the data” we use Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a large language model (LLM) to let users interact directly with the eDNA findings from all of Minderoo’s expeditions.  The user can simply enter what they are interested in and the LLM writes code in the background to answer their questions, the process used to find the answer is displayed for transparency. This provides an alternative way to interact with the data, enabling users to explore this dataset without the limitations of traditional searches.