IDEAcology: An interface to streamline and facilitate efficient, rigorous expert elicitation in ecology

Here, we demonstrate how IDEAcology aids in preparing for and implementing a structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol, an iterative quantitative expert elicitation framework. Expert judgement is used to inform decision-making on environmental assessment and management when imminent decisions are required, and quantitative data are absent or uninformative. Structured elicitation protocols can help improve the final judgements derived from experts, but they can also be administratively heavy and time-consuming, requiring manual collation of experts' estimates and rationales, construction and dissemination of summary plots for discussion and collating final estimates post-discussion. These challenges highlight the need for a centralised portal that enables synchronous access by all contributors, real-time structured facilitation of discussion, whether in person or online, and streamlined data management. To meet this need, we developed the IDEAcology interface (www.ideacology.com) to support data collation, summary, interactions and ultimately the deployment of structured expert elicitation using the IDEA protocol. The IDEAcology interface is designed to be a central portal for scientists and practitioners to easily implement structured expert elicitation projects, while also facilitating data management by providing a reliable and efficient way for elicitation managers to design and run an elicitation, and for experts to input, visualise and cross-examine estimates. The key advantages that IDEAcology provides include an easy-to-use interface with synchronous access to a single platform, reducing logistic difficulties, facilitating transparent discussion, improving the accuracy of estimates, enabling fast and efficient reporting by providing analysis-ready data outputs and lastly, flexibility in the types of elicitation questions that can be accommodated in the interface.