This is a capstone project for the Master of Environmental Data Science class of 2025 at Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara
Bren Project Page: Seamissions
Seamissions Dashboard: Seamissions Explorer
Global fisheries are heavily reliant on fossil fuels, contributing significantly to the rise in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions driving climate change. While satellite technology is commonly used to monitor land-based emissions, studies estimating ocean-based emissions remain limited, particularly in the fishing sector. In collaboration with the Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) and Global Fishing Watch (GFW), this project will leverage novel, high-resolution satellite-based datasets to provide precise insights into the GHG emissions associated with global fisheries. We will develop a reproducible, extensible, and open-source data processing pipeline to connect emissions data with seafood production data in an interactive dashboard. Our findings will enable novel research opportunities, and offer actionable data to identify major GHG contributors and could enable new policy and market-based interventions to reduce fisheries-related emissions at scale.
This organization houses three repositories for the Seamissions project:
- emissions_pipeline: This repository contains the code to assign emission quantiites for nine different pollutants by year, country, and FAO fishing region
- emissions_dashboard: This repository contains the code to visualize our final emisisons dataset through an interactive map hosted on a shiny app dashboard
- visualizations: This repository contains the code with which our results are visualized in graphs and tables
All of the data used in this project was provided by emLab. The data itself is housed on the emLab server and is accessed automatically by runing the code found in the emissions_pipeline repository.
Carmen Hoyt: Bren Profile | Github | Linkedin | website
Josh Mull: Bren Profile | Github | Linkedin | website
Nicole Pepper: Bren Profile | Github | Linkedin | website
Stephen Carroll: Bren Profile | Github | Linkedin | website
We are especially grateful for our client and faculty advisor:
Gavin McDonald, Senior Project Scientist, Environmental Markets Lab (emLab), Bren School of Environmental Science & Management
We also thank the following individuals for their support:
Bren School:
Dr. Steve Gaines, Dean & Distinguished Professor;
Dr. Carmen Galaz García, Assistant Teaching Professor;
Dr. Bruce Kendall, Professor & Associate Dean;
Dr. Sandy Sum, Teaching Assistant
emLab:
Echelle Burns, Project Scientist;
Pol Carbo Mestre, Data Scientist
Global Fishing Watch:
Tyler Clavelle, Senior Data Scientist
