Context
Fisheries scientists had four decades of trawl survey data showing that marine species were moving. Managers, journalists, and the public had almost no way to look at it. OceanAdapt was built to let anyone explore how the distribution of more than 650 marine species has changed over roughly forty years.
Decision
The biggest question was how does someone answer – where has this fish gone, and where is it going?. I built the tool around that question rather than around the shape of the data. This meant interactive maps, charts, and downloads as the main features.
Contribution
I was the engineering lead. My work covers the parts that make scientific data usable: species search, map queries, distribution charts, full data downloads, future projections, seasonal views, and the comparison controls that let two species or two time periods be read side by side.
Result
OceanAdapt was a free public resource. Work originating in it was incorporated into the Fourth National Climate Assessment and later added as a U.S. Global Change Research Program indicator, and NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit both point the public to it.
Learning
Early on I shipped a change that mixed several concerns in one commit, and noted at the time that it would be difficult to roll back. Nothing broke, but the lesson held: on a tool other institutions depend on, the ability to reverse a change quietly is worth more than the speed you gained by bundling it. Scoped pull requests, release branches, and reversible data operations became how I work, and the platform work I do now is built on that habit.