Mapping Out Solutions
Feature: with a few clicks of a mouse....
Research Associate Ben Best Has Millions of Marine Observations at
His Fingertips
by John Kerkering MEM’08
At first, the map of the British Isles on the plasma flat-screen television above Ben Best’s head appears static and unchanging. A vast, unbroken expanse of tranquil blue surrounds the islands.
But, with a few swift clicks of Best’s mouse, things begin to change.
A spectrum of new colors and a flurry of multicolored dots appear across the once-uniform stretch of blue. Each color represents a different ecological variable like sea surface temperature, wave height and wind speed.The dots represent field observations made by researchers starting in the 1990s.
“We have more than a million of those in total,”Best says, referring to the observations, which, in this case, signify specific mammal and seabird sightings in the North Atlantic. “In a few months or so,we should have something more like three or four million.”
He manipulates the program a bit more to show that, with a few more clicks of the mouse, he can make it display a host of other variables from almost any marine ecosystem on Earth, for any year since 1935.
Best is a research associate and doctoral candidate in Pat Halpin’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Laboratory.
The map he is “playing around with” is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System – Spatial Ecological Analysis of Megaverterbrate Populations (OBIS-SEAMAP), a groundbreaking online geo-archive of oceanographic data that is unrivaled in its breadth. (See it online at seamap.nicholas.duke.edu.)
The SEAMAP program currently contains 188 datasets and more than 1.1 million records of species sightings.A veritable clearinghouse of data, it is the place to go for biogeographic information on sea turtles,marine mammals and seabirds. Scientists, students, conservationists and policy analysts worldwide can use the map to learn where and when certain species can be found.
To make the SEAMAP archive even more useful to decision makers, its observations and survey tracks are combined with remotely sensed imagery to predict marine mammal habitats. This modeling project is funded by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), a consortium led by the U.S.Department of Defense.
The project’s principal clients are naval environmental officers who use it to study the habitats of “critters of concern such as marine mammals,” Best says.
By predicting where animals are likely to be at specific times of the year, the OBIS-SEAMAP and SERDP projects help organizations like the Navy, conservation groups and commercial fishing fleets avoid or reduce by-catch mortalities and potentially fatal run-ins with marine animals.
Despite his technical prowess, Best didn’t originally set out to make it a career.Growing up in California, he wasn’t particularly interested in computers, even though his stepfather taught computer science at a university. It wasn’t until Best’s undergraduate days at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that he was first introduced to Excel and realized the “power of scripting” and the speed it afforded over manual effort.
Around the same time, he developed an interest in marine science. A general biology major on the pre-med track, Best acknowledged that he was more “jazzed” by the poikilothermic nature of fish than by medicine. At that point, he switched majors to marine biology and never looked back.
In his senior year, he noticed that all the good environmental jobs seemed to require a familiarity with something called “GIS.” Best didn’t have a clue what GIS was, but he thought,“why not, I’ll do it.” He spent a fifth year at UC-Santa Barbara learning geographic information systems technology and taking research diving trips to the Channel Islands, Baja California and Big Sur. It was, he says in retrospect, “the most fantastic time.”
Following graduation, Best held down a number of technology-related jobs, from building Web pages to database management for the European Human Rights Foundation in Brussels, Belgium. He eventually ended up back at the Bren School of Environmental Science at UC-Santa Barbara, feeling that his skill set was “plateauing.”He decided it was time to get back to his core interests—marine ecology and GIS.
It was around this time that friends recommended he talk to a professor named Pat Halpin who was doing cutting-edge work in marine geospatial ecology. The two met over Thai food and beer, and, according to Best, the deal was cinched when it became known that they were both proud owners of 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalias, complete with pop-tops and kitchenettes.
Four and a half years later, Best says that was the best professional decision he ever made.
“I feel like I’ve landed at the epicenter of marine GIS,” the soft-spoken Californian says as he looks around the Marine Geospatial Ecology Laboratory with obvious pride and enthusiasm.“We’re doing things here that no one else is doing. I’m stoked to be doing this stuff.”
John Kerkering MEM’08 is the Nicholas School’s student communications assistant for 2006–07.
photo captions: Pat Halpin; tracking example collected by Halpin and Read's labs; Halpin with Ben Best.