Category Archives: Podcast

MMS 91: Peru, humpback whales and art

In this week’s episode master student Anna Costanza comes on the show to talk to Dr. Ashley Scarlett about her study on the bycatch of humpback whales in Peru, and how art is an incredible way to tell stakeholders’ stories.

Bio:

As an Illinoian born and bred, her younger self would pretend Lake Michigan was an ocean. After earning a B.S. in Environmental Science from Goshen College, IN, she moved from Midwest to the west coast and immediately dove deep into GIS courses and internships. If you ask her what my passion is – it’s science, but her love is art. GIS is the perfect intersection of the two.   She is currently a graduate student at San Francisco State University working towards an MS in Interdisciplinary Marine and Estuarine Science.

Thesis

For her thesis, she is collaborating with Pro Delphinus, a Peruvian non-profit, to study humpback whale and leatherback turtle bycatch within Peruvian small-scale fisheries. They leveraged fishermen’s knowledge and expert opinion as input data into an open-source bycatch risk assessment model to identify seasonal high bycatch risk areas among data-poor fisheries. 

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5e55226fec7f4996b038a8396bc16b79


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MMS 90: Humpback Whales’ Scars Run Deep

In this week’s episode, Allison Payne will be talking to Dr. Ashley Scarlett about her Masters’ thesis project on entanglement scars on humpback whales.

More on Allison Payne:

Allison Payne is a Master’s student at San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center and part of the Cetacean Field Research Team at the Marine Mammal Center, as well as a science communicator and naturalist. Her thesis work focuses on the accumulation of entanglement scars on humpback whales off the coast of central California using   Research Collective’s North Pacific Humpback Whale Catalog.


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MMS 89: Humpback whales return to San Francisco Bay – but face a threat from shipsHumpback whales return to San Francisco Bay but face a threat from ships

Humpbacks started coming back to San Francisco Bay in 2016 and now scientists are concerned about the risk of ship strikes. Dr. Ashley Scarlett talks to guest Rebekah Lane about this conservation issue.

Bekah Lane is a graduate student at San Francisco State University, studying the risk of ship strikes to humpback whales in San Francisco Bay in Dr. Ellen Hines’ lab. She is also a researcher in the Cetacean Field Research Team at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California 


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