Tony Hale

We offer you a simple tool that we created for our 75-person “work community” to help each other that yours might also find helpful. This is a mapping tool, which we call Care in the Time of Corona. It helps us locate and efficiently provide the support that our SFEI staff might offer one another. Quite simply, it facilitates assistance within our organization so that people can help their colleagues deal with challenges of this unprecedented situation. The errands, food, medicine, or even compassionate discussion they need can be addressed through a convenient and filterable map. We hope this guidance and the spirit behind it will help support your community and sustain a sense of well-being as we meet this challenge head on together.

In a partnership with Kinetica, a data analytics start-up, and Oracle, SFEI and SCCWRP leveraged public funding from the California Ocean Protection Council to advance automated trash detection capabilities. The team deployed servers in the @Oracle Cloud to increase performance dynamically. Learn more about this project...

SFEI has developed novel, cost-effective solutions to costly problems. In particular, our work with drones or Unoccupied Aerial Systems (UAS) has yielded very promising results. We have used UAS to address a number of scientific challenges and use cases. SFEI applications of UAS include, wetland monitoring, restoration monitoring, sediment volume estimations, and trash surveys leveraging machine learning algorithms. In the course of our use of UAS, we have derived some useful analyses on the technology that lend the resulting products credibility and reliability.

The San Francisco Estuary Partnership (SFEP) brings together the estuarine community every two years at the State of the Estuary Conference and, periodically, SFEP also reports on the State of the Estuary, summarizing the latest scientific findings about ecosystem health. This State of the Estuary Report is the only place where a holistic view of ecosystem function is provided across both the Bay and the Delta. This year, SFEI provided scientific leadership and technical support for the report, which focuses on the ties between social and ecological resilience for our estuary.

SFEI’s Diana Lin and Tony Hale will be presenting at the California Water Boards Water Data Science Symposium on July 1-2, 2019.  Diana Lin will be sharing preliminary results from SFEI’s Microplastic Monitoring in San Francisco Bay and Adjacent National Marine Sanctuaries study, which is the first comprehensive regional study of mic

CRAM is a standardized, scientifically defensible rapid assessment method for monitoring the ecological conditions of wetlands throughout California. Because it is standardized, one can compare ecological conditions of wetlands locally, regionally and statewide.

On November 16, 2018, the project team helped to coordinate a Trash Data Dive convened by the State Water Board’s Office of Information Management and Analysis. Hosted at SFEI’s offices, the Trash Data Dive was well-attended and drew participants from all over California to discuss the opportunities to address entrenched problems with respect to trash-related information.

Municipalities across the state and beyond are carefully planning and implementing green infrastructure in their developed landscape to restore key aspects of the natural water cycle. Green infrastructure helps to achieve stormwater attenuation and contaminant filtration by increasing the pervious surfaces in often sophisticated ways.

The most recent meeting of the San Francisco Estuary Geospatial Workgroup featured Pete Kauhanen and Lawrence Sim of SFEI's Environmental program. This meeting focused on emerging technologies for visualizing the changing Bay around us. Presenters discussed new data, tools, and approaches that are helping inform regional natural resource management.

In 2014, SFEI and the Santa Valley Water District launched a collaborative partnership aimed at sharing experience, knowledge and resources, and working toward a shared vision of watershed management. Through this partnership, the District has asked SFEI to develop a set of online tools to: 1) identify opportunities for multi-benefit management actions in and along the channels managed by the District; and 2) track the impacts of those actions towards meeting established management targets.

SFEI science will feature prominently at the Sixth International Marine Debris Conference in San Diego next week:

In an event convened by the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, SFEI contributed its own intellectual labor to the State of the Estuary Conference. Letitia Grenier served as the lead scientist for the State of the Estuary Report, unveiled at the gathering, and SFEI's scientists and technologists were featured prominently in the program on subjects ranging from nutrients to landscape resilience to green infrastructure to data and tools. By all measures, it was a successful conference.

This project is funded by a USEPA wetland development grant (2015-2017) to develop a recommended funding and business model for the EcoAtlas toolset.   EcoAtlas is a framework and toolset recommended in the State's Wetland and Riparian Area Monitoring Plan (WRAMP) of the California Wetland Monitoring Workgroup (CWMW). The tools enable users to visualize and assess the distribution, abundance, diversity, and condition of surface waters in a landscape or watershed context.  The Business Plan project is developing several overview and planning memos and a final, compiled recommendation for an EcoAtlas business plan. Those documents are made available here as they are completed.

The purpose of this project is to expand the existing San Francisco Bay Regional Data Center (RDC) to include the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Suisun Marsh (Delta). The anticipated outcome of this project is an estuary-wide data repository where one currently does not exist. 

The Flood Control 2.0 project team was presented with an Outstanding Environmental Project Award at the 13^th Biennial State of the Estuary Conference in Oakland, CA. The award is given by the Friends of the San Francisco Estuary to projects that benefit the San Francisco-Bay Delta Estuary and its watersheds.

San Francisco Estuary
Geospatial Workgroup Meeting

Stranger Things: Sharing Information in an Open Data World

January 30, 2018
2:00 PM - 4:30 PM
with time for networking after
Bay Conference Center, Tiburon, CA

AGENDA:
Welcome and Introductions
Presentations - followed by Q & A

SFEI worked in partnership with the Delta Conservancy to complete a two year project funded by a USEPA National Environmental Information Exchange Network (NEIN) grant to expand the existing San Francisco Bay Regional Data Center (RDC) to include the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Suisun Marsh (Delta) for an estuary-wide data repository. SFEI received Delta data from public and private sector sources ranging from scientists, environmental program staff, managers, the public and other stakeholders.

New Project Tracker online forms enhance EcoAtlas' regional capacity for habitat restoration project tracking, assessment and reporting. Partners can now upload and edit project information and approve projects for display on EcoAtlas. Project Tracker meets the important need of providing tools for partners to manage their projects and display information on EcoAtlas, a tool for visualizing the condition and extent of California's aquatic resources.

The key benefits of Project Tracker include:

SFEI and several agency partners recently completed a multi-year, EPA funded project called Flood Control 2.0. The goal of the project was to develop information that is useful for integrating habitat restoration into flood management at the Bay edge. Project outputs are now available at floodcontrol.sfei.org.

This project will create an EcoAtlas user community for the Lahontan region of the Sierra Nevada to develop capacities within the region to apply EcoAtlas through existing local, regional, state, and federal programs to track projects and summarize map-based and rapid assessment information at the watershed scale.