Coordinator:
Martin O'CONNOR

Fishu@lis Personal Barometer

The Fishu@lis Personal Barometer prototype serves to relate the consumption and lifestyle choices of users with impacts in the marine environment. Through a dynamic web interface users select which language they wish to operate in and which nation they wish the analysis to be based upon.

A drop-down menu for selecting species, an input box for entering the amount consumed, and checkboxes for indicating the form of consumption are the principal sources of user input (Fig. 1). Users are asked to define how much of each species they consume and in what form it is eaten, over the course of a month.

The 'enter' button launches the calculation for the data selected. This converts the entered mass to the equivalent annual live weight of fish consumed, displayed to the right hand side of the page. Next to the bar indicating the user's consumption is a figure calculated for the average national consumption per capita. The results show fish consumption coded from red to green according to whether the stock/species is currently being overexploited, sustainably managed or underexploited. Blue indicates that there is currently inadequate scientific knowledge to offer advice. Although the individual stock/species bars are shown here in solid colour, the second release of the personal barometer will in fact display spectra of colours for each stock/species, for reasons discussed below.