The Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies

Hi all! My name is Zoe and I go to Smith College. This summer I worked with Eric Ward to analyze spatiotemporal patterns in groundfish. I spent most of my time at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) in the office with a fellow intern, Callie Murakami. Our task was to combine and analyze groundfish bottom trawl survey data from three main regions that are divided along national boundaries: NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service manages the U.S. west coast and Alaska, while Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) manages British Columbia. Our goal was to make this data accessible to stakeholders such as stock assessors, fisheries council members, and ecosystem indicator groups, as well as the general public.

We developed an R package called fishyplots to store our data and functions, which included plots on fish biomass, growth, length-weight, and so forth. Much of our code was inspired by a previous report from DFO. We also explored spatial statistical modeling with the R package sdmTMB, and used the predictions from these models to create maps. Using the functions and data in fishyplots, we experimented with reactive coding by creating an R Shiny app, which is a tool to make interactive websites.

We met each week with a larger team of scientists across regions to relay our updates, garner feedback, and revise our plans for the coming days. Occasionally, we walked over to Montlake to attend these meetings at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center. We were also invited to many other events throughout the summer, such as the Stock Assessment Review panel for sablefish. Towards the end of our stay, we presented our Shiny app to stock assessment and ecosystem indicator teams at both the Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Science Centers – there is a lot of investment in this project right now, which is great to see!

This project has taught me many advantageous technical skills, such as package development with R, version control in collaborative coding spaces with Github, and reactive programming with Shiny. It has also reaffirmed my intention to pursue a graduate education; I was given some great advice about particular programs to look into by many scientists I met. I am so grateful for the incredible experience I had this summer, and want to thank Eric, my many mentors at NWFSC, AFSC, and DFO, and those at CICOES who made this happen!

Project Introduction

Research Poster