CalCOFI Visualize Data Tools
CalCOFI Station Explorer is a data discovery tool built by Ben Best and Betty Huang, under the direction of Dr. Erin Satterthwaite, in partnership with CalCOFI and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It builds on an earlier prototype developed as part of the UCSB Data Science Student Capstone.
The Station Explorer aggregates metadata across CalCOFI’s integrated release database — 12 datasets spanning physical oceanography, nutrients and carbonate chemistry, phytoplankton and zooplankton, fish larvae and eggs, and seabirds and marine mammals — to help you find what’s measured, where, and when.
What you can do here
- Browse by category or by dataset from the panel on the right — each entry expands to show its variables, grouped by measurement so related readings from different instruments or datasets (e.g. bottle vs. CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) temperature) sit together.
- Click any station on the map for its full coverage: which datasets have data there, observations by year, and seasonality by month.
- Search by name — common or scientific — with results grouped by category.
- Filter by year range with the slider; stations with coverage for a selected parameter highlight on the map, and a marker on the slider shows that parameter’s own actual data span.
Explore CalCOFI’s data on oxygen levels, to explore how this critical component of the ecosystem varies naturally in the ocean off of the California coast and discuss how the changing climate’s impact on oxygen places the vitality of life throughout the ocean at risk.
This website is dedicated to enabling and generating online products using data from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI). By streamlining data ingestion into the database, summary extraction of data from the database using a public-facing API, and making helper functions available in an R library, we can easily produce interactive applications and online reports of value to scientific and management audiences.
The CalCOFI Integrated Application is an open-source tool that helps users explore relationships between larval fish populations and ocean conditions across time and space. It integrates fish eggs and larvae data with oceanographic bottle data (e.g., temperature, salinity, and nutrients) from the CalCOFI program.