Sampling the Sea

Sampling the Sea (STS) will consolidate and display Monterey Bay Aquarium’s data on fisheries at risk in Google Ocean; STS will engage GLOBE students across the planet to provide data about the fish available in their markets and about their weekly fish consumption; STS will encourage the sharing of student provided fish-market photography through ePals; STS will gather the GLOBE data, aggregate this and provide data visualizations back to GLOBE classrooms through Google Earth. Students will then analyze these graphs to learn the results of their data collection effort; STS will link global student data to data on fisheries at risk. This will enable classroom investigations into the environmental impacts of consuming these fish and the alternatives for sustaining the fisheries.
From ocean to market

Sustaining ocean fisheries will take end-to-end cooperation embracing consumers as well as producers. Protein from the oceans supply nearly twenty-percent of the food protein for the planet. In many regions, this level is closer to fifty percent. Because of overfishing, scarcity is often not reflected in consumer price, and so consumers may not know that their food sources are in danger of disappearing. Better information about sustainable fisheries helps consumers choose fish that are being sustainably caught and avoid those that are not. Informed consumers who are concerned about the future of their favorite foods can also become ambassadors for sustainable fisheries. In many developing nations where fish consumption represents not only a major protein source but also a major income source, half the population is younger than twenty-five years old. These young consumers need to be come engaged in the global dialog about the condition and future of harvesting protein from the ocean.

DigitalOcean (DO) will partner with the NASA GLOBE program and the ePals school-based social networking service to create a global, student-led consumer research database on fish markets and consumption. The GLOBE program currently reaches one and a half millions students in one-hundred and ten nations across the planet. GLOBE programs integrate earth data collection and analysis projects into science curriculums. The ePals secure, in-school social networking service already reaches forty-thousand classrooms world-wide, with the majority of these in the US. ePals services (such as blogs and emails) are monitored by teachers to be safe for school use. DO will also partner with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for data on fisheries at risk and with Google for integration of the project’s data into Google Oceans (forthcoming). The project’s initial year will run concurrently with a complementary year-long research project by five graduate students at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Management. This project will explore how consumer information can be used to influence producer and resource manger decisions on fisheries.
STS Goals

The goal of the Sampling the Sea project is to engage hundreds of thousands of students to examine their local fish consumption practices, and then to link this local knowledge to a broader understanding about fisheries at risk.

Nearly the entire human population relies on ocean protein as a food source important to their nutrition and cuisine. Yet many of the fisheries that supply this protein are in grave danger today. The World Wildlife Federation reports that nearly 90% of all the ocean’s large fish have been fished out. This situation is financially disastrous for the producer communities and potentially life threatening for consumers who rely on this source of protein in their diets. The STS project will advance understanding of this situation across the planet, encourage consumption of sustainable fish products, and support efforts to extend sustainable fishing practices to fisheries now at risk. This program benefits a sizable percentage of the human population.

The optimal outcome (after five years) would include the following: fifty thousand students adding fish consumption data into the system; with a similar number of students sharing photographs and stories; a measurable improvement in the students’ awareness of sustainability issues; and, a measurable change in planetary eating habits toward sustainably caught fish. The outcome would also support a fundamental shift toward sustainable fishing practices in more fisheries around the globe.