Browse all Publications

Filter by author: Sonia Stephens

All author's publications are listed below.

Jul 16, 2018 Article
Communicating with Coastal Decision-Makers and Environmental Educators via Sea Level Rise Decision-Support Tools

by Denise DeLorme, Sonia Stephens, Scott Hagen and Matthew Bilskie

Communicating about environmental risks requires understanding and
addressing stakeholder needs, perspectives, and anticipated uses for
communication products and decision-support tools. This paper
demonstrates how long-term dialogue between scientists and stakeholders
can be facilitated by repeated stakeholder focus groups. We describe a
dialogic process for developing science-based decision-support tools as
part of a larger sea level rise research project in the Gulf of Mexico. We
demonstrate how focus groups can be used effectively in tool development,
discuss how stakeholders plan to use tools for decision-making and
broader public outreach, and describe features that stakeholders perceive
would make products more usable.

Volume 17 • Issue 03 • 2018

Mar 13, 2014 Article
Communicating evolution with a Dynamic Evolutionary Map

by Sonia Stephens

Metaphors and visualizations are important for science communication, though they may have limitations. This paper describes the development and evaluation of a novel interactive visualization, the "Dynamic Evolutionary Map"' (DEM), which communicates biological evolution using a non-standard metaphor. The DEM uses a map metaphor and interactivity to address conceptual limitations of traditional tree-based evolutionary representations. In a pilot evaluation biology novices used the DEM to answer questions about evolution. The results suggest that this visualization communicates some conceptual affordances differently than trees. Therefore, the described approach of building alternative visual metaphors for challenging concepts appears useful for science communication.

Volume 13 • Issue 01 • 2014