MIDAS: A Spatial Decision Support System for Monitoring Marine Management Areas

This article describes the design and implementation of Marine Integrated Decision Analysis System (MIDAS), a spatial decision support system (SDSS). MIDAS allows users to select values for a set of governance, ecological and socioeconomic variables. Outcomes resulting from interactions between these variables are then modeled to demonstrate the effectiveness of management in marine managed areas (MMAs) in Belize, Panama, and other areas. MIDAS is written in Java SDK and Runtime Environment (JRE; version 6 update 5) that enables portability across computer platforms. The article describes the utility of MIDAS in three contexts: (1) to assist managers, policy makers, and various stakeholders in understanding the critical determining factors (CDFs) for MMA success, (2) to enhance multi-stakeholder analysis and promote consensus, and (3) to provide a free and intuitive interface with a capability to incorporate user valuations of factors affecting marine management and to generate reports and maps concerning risk. MIDAS has been tested and validated by a variety of users in three workshops.