Hear about my dissertation in 3-minutes.

Video abstract for submitted manuscript "Visualizing Life in the Deep: A Creative Pipeline for Data-Driven Animations to Facilitate Marine Mammal Research, Outreach, and Conservation." Paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9622956 Video Transcript: Have you ever wondered what marine mammals do beneath the surface? How about when they hear the sound of a predator, the rumbling of a ship above, or have just escaped a near-death encounter? Our new paper explains how we turn marine mammal tagging data into animations and sound to facilitate research, communication, and conservation. A critical first step of each collaboration included an iterative process of storyboarding, data sharing, and scriptwriting to refine our key messages and the target audience. We wrote scripts that use real data on position, orientation, swimming behavior, and heart rate to animate models of marine mammals, so that we can see and hear how they react to disturbances in their natural environment. Our 3D humpback whale animation uses tag data to reconstruct cooperative foraging behavior on the seafloor and demonstrate the potential harm of bottom-set fishing gear. Our 2D elephant seal animation follows a group of seals halfway across the Pacific as their decisions to forage and rest while avoiding predators shift in response to their internal and external environments. For our newest 3D animations, we created two custom tools that allow us to see and hear the impact of a disturbance. First, we built swim controllers for rigged 3D models that take raw accelerometer data and generate an animation of realistic swimming behavior to the beat of the data, alternating between swimming and gliding. Next, we wrote a script that synthesizes a soundtrack from electrocardiogram data of deep-diving marine mammals. When they get scared, animals respond with an increase in heart rate, vigorously pumping blood through their body so that they can run away at top speed. But let’s listen to the beating heart of a narwhal as he runs away after being entangled in fishing gear. At an extremely low 2.9 beats per minute, it reveals a physiological paradox- where its heart and body are at odds. Learning more about responses like these can teach us how marine mammals respond to disturbances in their natural habitat, and how we can work to mitigate those disturbances to protect them. We argue that by equipping biologists to leverage powerful industry animation tools, we can expedite complex data analysis, promote science communication outcomes, foster empathy and compassion for the natural world, and better serve the ecosystems we aim to protect. We invite you to learn more, download sample scenes, and learn to visualize your own data through interactive tutorials on: Our webpage: https://www.jessiekb.com/artforscicomm and Github: https://github.com/jmkendallbar/VisualizingLifeintheDeep

Animation by Jessica Kendall-Bar. Elephant seal illustrations by Danielle Dube through an Art-Science Residency with the Norris Center for Natural History. Music by Connor Vance. Read our article in Science Advances to learn more: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/12/eabd9818

The degradation of coastal habitats, particularly coral reefs, raises risks by increasing the exposure of coastal communities to flooding hazards during storms. The protective services of these natural defenses are not assessed in the same rigorous economic terms as artificial defenses, such as seawalls, and therefore often are not considered in decision-making. Here we combine engineering, ecologic, geospatial, social, and economic tools to provide a rigorous valuation of the coastal protection benefits of all U.S. coral reefs in the States of Hawaiʻi and Florida, the territories of Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. We follow risk-based valuation approaches to map flood zones at 10-square-meter resolution along all 3,100+ kilometers of U.S. reef-lined shorelines for different storm probabilities to account for the effect of coral reefs in reducing coastal flooding. We quantify the coastal flood risk reduction benefits provided by coral reefs across storm return intervals using the latest information from the U.S. Census Bureau, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Bureau of Economic Analysis to identify their annual expected benefits, a measure of the annual protection provided by coral reefs. The annual value of flood risk reduction provided by U.S. coral reefs is more than 18,000 lives and $1.805 billion in 2010 U.S. dollars. These data provide stakeholders and decision makers with spatially explicit, rigorous valuation of how, where, and when U.S. coral reefs provide critical coastal storm flood reduction benefits, and open up new opportunities to fund their protection and restoration. The overall goal is to ultimately reduce the risk to, and increase the resiliency of, U.S. coastal communities. Learn more at: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/pcmsc/science/value-us-coral-reefs-risk-reduction and https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ofr2019102 View the audio-described version and this version at: https://www.usgs.gov/media/videos/how-our-reefs-protect-us-valuing-benefits-us-reefs

Each year since 2015, I have given this lecture on Metazoan Diversity to UC Berkeley's EPS/IB Oceans C82 course which includes a brief overview of the diversity of invertebrates in our oceans. This video is designed for educational purposes only and features the following videos: Sponge Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8a0oNsDEx8 Swimming Anemone Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm98n3908QM&t=10s Jelly Birth Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zi1DCfcVqU&t=552s Disco Clam Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAB-8spi7Xg Dendronotis Carnivorous Nudibranch Video: https://vimeo.com/231458910 Mimic Octopus Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os6HD-sCRn8 Bobbit Worm Video: https://vimeo.com/28280553 Mantis Shrimp Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtNAqK_V-lg Mantis Shrimp v. Disco Clam Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja-4ez9TopI Pyrosome Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EQGA_4BZ5s

I created this animation to communicate the flood protection benefits of mangroves, quantified in a recent paper by Professor Mike Beck's Coastal Resilience Lab at UCSC (https://coastalresilience.ucsc.edu). Learn more about this research at the website I designed for the Coastal Resilience Lab at coastalresiliencelab.org/wetlands