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BIO

Dr. Jessica Kendall-Bar is a Scripps Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for Marine Biotechnology & Biomedicine at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. Kendall-Bar’s postdoctoral work builds on her doctoral research at UC Santa Cruz, where she developed innovative tools to non-invasively measure and visualize the sleep patterns of wild seals. At Scripps, Kendall-Bar seeks to compare the extreme physiology of elite divers- including humans, penguins, seals, and whales. A scientist by training, Kendall-Bar’s research has spanned from computer graphics to human sleep deprivation and arthropod mating behavior. However, Kendall-Bar believes that scientific progress is futile unless communicated effectively. Her animations, illustrated children’s books, and data visualizations aim to accurately portray science and its role in preserving underwater ecosystems. Her work as a science communication specialist distills scientific complexity into data-driven stories, graphics, and animations that accelerate research, outreach, and conservation.

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RESEARCH

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH

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DESIGN

Engineer new
biosensors

Read More >
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VISUALIZE

See invisible behavior and physiology

ANALYZE

From individuals to ecosystems

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COMMUNICATE

Science communication to maximize impact

the questions

MEDICINE

PHYSIOLOGY

BEHAVIOR

ECOLOGY

EVOLUTION

DATA
SCIENCE

ART

STORY-TELLING

the approach

ENGINEERING

PUBLICATIONS

PUBLICATIONS

2022

JM Kendall-Bar, R Mukherji*, J Nichols*, C Lopez*, DA Lozano*, JK Pitman, RR Holser, RS Beltran, M Schalles, CL Field, SP Johnson, AL Vyssotski, DP Costa & TM Williams.

Eavesdropping on the brain at sea: development of a surface-mounted system to detect weak electrophysiological signals from wild animals.

Animal Biotelemetry

DOI: 10.1186/s40317-022-00287-x

2021

RS Beltran, JM Kendall-Bar, E Pirotta, T Adachi, Y Naito, A Takahashi, J Cremers, PW Robinson, DE Crocker, and DP Costa.

Lightscapes of Fear: How Mesopredators Balance Starvation and Predation in the Open Ocean.

Science Advances

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd9818

2021

JM Kendall-Bar, NX Kendall-Bar, AG Forbes, G McDonald, PJ Ponganis, C Williams, M Horning, A Hindle, H Klinck, RS Beltran, AS Friedlaender, D Wiley, DP Costa, & TM Williams.

Visualizing Life in the Deep: a creative pipeline for data-driven animations to facilitate marine mammal research, outreach, and conservation.

IEEE VIS

DOI: 10.1109/VISAP52981.2021.00007

2019

JM Kendall-Bar, AL Vyssotski, LM Mukhametov, JM Siegel, and OI Lyamin.

Eye State Asymmetry during Aquatic Unihemispheric Slow Wave Sleep in Northern Fur Seals (Callorhinus Ursinus).

PLoS ONE

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0217025

2017

JM Kendall-Bar & VK Iyengar.

Sexual Selection by the Seashore: The Roles of Body Size and Weaponry in Mate Choice and Competition in the Maritime Earwig (Anisolabis Maritima).

Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

DOI: 10.1007/s00265-016-2233-9

2016

JM Kendall-Bar, D Weller, H Fearnbach, S Shane, GS Schorr, EA Falcone, J Calambokidis, A Schulman-Janiger, and J Barlow.

Movement and Occurrence Patterns of Short-Finned Pilot Whales (Globicephala Macrorhynchus) in the Eastern North Pacific.

Aquatic Mammals

DOI: 10.1578/AM.42.3.2016.300

***2022

JM Kendall-Bar

Sleeping while diving: Tools to detect, analyze, and visualize sleep in wild seals

Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Accession No. 29215006

*** Non-peer-reviewed publication: doctoral dissertation.

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SCIENCE COMMUNICATION& 
DATA VISUALIZATION

VIDEOS & ANIMATIONS

Videos, animations, and public lectures that use data, art, and underwater cinematography to tell stories about science.

MAPS & INFOGRAPHICS

Maps and infographics that incorporate data and art to
communicate scientific results

Science Communcation
Videos

VIDEOS & ANIMATIONS

Visualizing Life in the Deep
03:13
Jessica Kendall-Bar

Visualizing Life in the Deep

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
How Our Reefs Protect Us: Valuing the Benefits of U.S. Reefs
03:21
USGS

How Our Reefs Protect Us: Valuing the Benefits of U.S. Reefs

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