A software tool for elicitation of expert knowledge about species richness or similar counts

Elicitation of expert knowledge has proven to be useful in a variety of disciplines including ecology, conservation management and policy. Here we report the development of a protocol and software tool that aids elicitation of expert knowledge of complex systems of count data, focusing on a case study of elicitation of species richness estimates for coral reefs. The software uses newly developed elicitation procedures to elicit probability distributions of counts in a structured and ordered protocol. We present a novel tool that has considerable advantage over more classical “survey” type methods for canvassing expert opinion, including the ability to produce rapid feedback based on fitted statistical distributions (thereby ensuring that expert's opinions are captured with accuracy) and a means of estimating credible bounds for estimates (essential when few experts are available). It is user friendly, based on open source software (R and tcl/tk), cross platform (Windows and Mac OSX) and the code can be easily modified to tailor the software to a range of applications.