About

Marine Ecology Project is a citizen science project covering California coast. The project began in 2019 when Fort Ross Conservancy, working in partnership with Civic Hub, has turned to Microsoft’s artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand the environmental changes impacting the Sonoma Coast.

Over the last decade Fort Ross Conservancy’s Marine Mammal Monitoring program collected a trove of raw census data on California Sea Lions, Harbor Seals, and Steller Sea Lions sighted at Fort Ross and Salt Point State Park parks in Western Sonoma County, which are part of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. To make the most of this observation data, Fort Ross Conservancy approached the Civic Hub information portal for the City and County of San Francisco to find digitalization solution partners. Civic Hub is a San Francisco based think tank which strives to promote citizen science projects across California. Civic Hub stepped up by providing needed technology. CityNext and Microsoft Azure, partners from across the Microsoft ecosystem, also answered the call, offering solutions and services to help transform this data into a meaningful digital resource. With Microsoft financial backing, the Civic Hub and FRC’s Marine Mammal Monitoring team approached a local San Francisco nonprofit, Code Tenderloin, which specializes in adult vocational training, to provide a qualified workforce to jumpstart the project.

Funds from Microsoft CityNext underwrote stipends for the Code Tenderloin participants who got valuable work experience by standardizing and digitizing MMM’s paper surveys and building the database architecture. Meanwhile, the Civic Hub offered project management expertise and experts in advanced engineering solutions to quickly utilize the tools offered by Microsoft Azure cloud computing service.

In early 2020, our team acquired a volunteer data scientist who is a Code Tenderloin graduate; he is now finalizing the deliverables of the project, namely the creation of MMM digital database and map data visualization.

Once completed, the project will serve the interest of a nationally significant marine ecosystem by offering computing models and big data visualization to the scientific community needed to help assess the health of the Sonoma Coast environment.