The purpose of this repository is to provide a walk-through of how to utilize NOAA's marine protected area dataset located at the MPA Inventory website. There are many packages that can potentially be used to visualize this dataset, but we chose a handy one called 'folium'. Folium is a python library built off a JavaScript Library called Leaflet. Both of these packages are free, open-source libraries that allow the user to create maps and visualize data in a similar way to google maps. This dataset could be very useful to any user who would like to visualize MPAs, and overlay other data on top of this, potentially a time-series dataset, to examine the effect of MPAs on factors such as fishing, IUCN marine species risk status, ocean acidification, changes in sea surface temperature... among many others. Ultimately, we hope that this notebook will be a useful educational tool for those looking to explore this dataset.
Colleen McCamy, Master of Environmental Data Science Student, (colleenmccamy@bren.ucsb.edu)
Atahualpa Gomez, Master of Environmental Data Science Student, (atahualpa@ucsb.edu)
Jared Petry, Master of Environmental Data Science Student, (jaredpetry@ucsb.edu)
Adelaide Robinson, Master of Environmental Data Science Student, (adelaide_robinson@ucsb.edu)