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