Master's Project Directory

Overview of MEDS Capstone projects Overview of MESM Group projects

Black Bear Aware: Predicting Human-Black Bear Conflict Likelihood in a Changing Climate

MESM 2023 Group Project

Group Members: Mia Guarnieri, Claire Meuter, Samantha (Sam) Rozal, Chase Tarr

Faculty Advisors: Sarah Anderson

Clients: California Department of Fish & Wildlife

Carbon Free Housing and Dining: A UCSB Electrification Study

MESM 2023 Group Project

Group Members: Drew Andersen, Logan Babcock, Daija Odom, Marco Palombo, Emily Pelstring

Faculty Advisors: Kyle Meng

Clients: UCSB Sustainability , UCSB Housing, Dining & Auxiliary Enterprises

Constructing a Model to Identify Markets for Rooftop Solar on Multifamily Housing

MESM 2023 Group Project

Group Members: Cameron (Cam) Audras, Grace Bianchi, Virginia Pan, Naomi Raal, Julia Bickford

Faculty Advisors: Eric Masanet

Clients: Zero Net Energy (ZNE) Capital

waves crashing on the coastline with two surfers on the wave.

Integrating Ecosystem Services into a Prioritization Model for Surf Protected Areas

MESM 2023 Group Project

Group Members: Kort Alexander, Sachiko Lamen, Kiera Matiska, Conner Smith, Kirsten White

Faculty Advisors: Ben Halpern

Clients: Surf Conservation Partnership

Projections of Future Cropland Abandonment: Impacts to Biodiversity and Carbon Sequestration

MESM 2023 Group Project

Group Members: Lucas Boyd, Michelle Geldin, Shayan Kaveh, Nickolas (Nick) McManus, Max Settineri

Faculty Advisors: Ashley Larsen

Clients: Conservation International

California landscape of rolling hills with green vegetation and blue skies

Collaborative Conservation Planning for the Gaviota Region

MESM 2023 Group Project

Group Members: Pol Carbó Mestre, Lauren Harris, Alexandra Martin, Alissa Patterson, Alessandra Puig-Santana, Katherine (Kat) Rosencrance

Faculty Advisors: Kelly Caylor

Clients: The Nature Conservancy, Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve

Woman and man hiking through valley, with snowcapped mountains.

A Business Model Centering Environmentally, Economically, and Socially Responsible Adventure Tourism

Travelleco connects travelers with eco-friendly, locally-owned tourism providers to reduce environmental damage and economic inequality in tourism. The platform promotes transparency with sustainability scores, tracking both environmental impacts and local economic benefits.

Group Members: Anne (Annie) Combs, Deanna Elliott, Katherine Orellana

Faculty Advisors: Emily Cotter, Mark Buntaine, Robert Heilmayr

River running through a vast lush landscape, clouds in a blue sky

Informing Forest Conservation Regulations in Paraguay

This project estimates how changes to the rules governing private LUPs could affect the extent of forest cover and agricultural land in the Paraguayan Chaco through a four-step approach: (1) Assess property owners' compliance that deforestation only occurs in authorized areas and determine deforestation rates by using geospatial overlays, (2) Estimate protected forest area under different potential laws in the undeveloped Paraguayan Chaco region by creating mock properties with simulated land use plans, (3) Integrate the simulated LUP configurations into a machine learning model to examine how potential changes to land use laws might influence future deforestation patterns, and (4) To inform forest conservation regulations by providing INFONA and other stakeholders with an interactive platform for exploring the results.

Group Members: Atahualpa (Ata) Ayala, Dalila Lara, Alexandria (Alex) Reed, Guillermo Romero

Faculty Advisors: Robert Heilmayr

Clients: UCSB Bren School & Environmental Studies Department

Assessing Fire in Groundwater-Dependent Ecosystems

We produced spatial layers of four different wildfire metrics, and conducted exploratory statistical analyses to assess how these wildfire metrics may be affected by GDEs in California. These layers and analyses are incorporated into an interactive dashboard that allows users to view general spatial relationships between groundwater variables, such as GDEs, and various wildfire metrics.

Group Members: Jillian Allison, Meagan Brown, Andre Dextre, Wade Sedgwick

Faculty Advisors: Max Moritz

Clients: The Nature Conservancy

Evaluating Carbon Emissions from Electric Arc Furnace Steel Plants in the United States

This project provides the first facility-level analysis of indirect carbon emissions from EAF steel plants in the US. As the US steel industry seeks to decarbonize and promote green steel, understanding the Scope 2 emissions of EAF steel production is essential. The calculated emissions and emissions intensity for each steel plant are available in a public dataset as well as an interactive Tableau dashboard.

Group Members: Erica Bishop, Ruth Enriquez, Amritpal (Amrit) Sandhu, Michael Zargari

Faculty Advisors: Roland Geyer

Clients: Global Energy Monitor

Improving Monitoring and Evaluation of Enforcement in Coastal Marine Protected Areas and Fisheries

Through this project, the capstone team created a reproducible workflow to streamline data entry for the MPS Tracker, as well as a data visualization tool to summarize and highlight trends. These deliverables allow WildAid Marine to increase their efficiency in monitoring and improving MPA enforcement, and successfully share progress with donors and stakeholders.

Group Members: Kiran Favre, Elise Gonzales, Jared Petry, Adelaide Robinson

Faculty Advisors: Gavin McDonald

Clients: WildAid

Automating Climate Scenario Creation for Wildfire Modeling

This project contributes to the larger Building Resilience to Wildfires initiative by presenting a process for creating these potential climate scenarios by stitching together pieces of existing climate model projections. To build each piece of a climate scenario, or each ‘segment’, climate models are searched for pieces that match the specified climate criteria of interest for that very segment. Once all desired segments are built, segments are then stitched together to make one continuous time-series: a ‘climate scenario’.

Group Members: Victoria Cutler, Erica Dale, Mallory Giesie, Lewis White

Faculty Advisors: Christina Tague

Clients: UC Disaster Resilience Network + UCSB Natural Reserve System Collaborative

Co-Locating a Power Couple: Retrofitting Existing Wind Projects with Solar PV in the U.S.

Adding solar PV to existing wind energy sites can boost profits and minimize the need for new transmission infrastructure. This study used a nonlinear optimization model to size solar PV additions at over 1,300 U.S. wind projects, ranking sites by environmental impact and cost efficiency.

Group Members: Michelle Lam, Colleen McCamy

Clients: UCSB Environmental Studies Department

Developing a Data Pipeline for Kelp Forest Modeling

The ecology of giant kelp is complex and the formation of kelp forests is impacted by many factors, including ocean nutrient concentrations, water depth, sea surface temperature, and seafloor habitat. The Santa Barbara Channel has been home to many long-term research projects that collect data on these factors. Unfortunately, this information is in many formats and data structures making it challenging for researchers to easily incorporate it into their work. This project creates a shortcut for acquiring and using these data by synthesizing a data set of nutrient concentrations, water depth, sea surface temperature, seafloor habitat, kelp area, and kelp biomass.

Group Members: Erika Egg, Jessica French, Javier Patrón, Elke Windschitl

Faculty Advisors: Samantha Stevenson

Clients: Ocean Rainforest, Inc. and UCSB Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Science

Measuring Agricultural Adaptation to Climate Change in Zambia Using Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning

In this project, we conduct a case study of Zambia to demonstrate a recently developed machine learning pipeline. We use the “Multi-task Observations using Satellite Imagery & Kitchen Sinks” (MOSAIKS) machine learning approach. In this approach, we use processed numerical data from satellite images and agricultural survey data to develop machine learning models that predict various agricultural variables over time.

Group Members: Andrew Bartnik, Carl (Carlo) Broderick, Gabrielle Smith, Hailey Veirs

Clients: UCSB Bren School

Optimal Green Infrastructure: Reducing Stormwater Pollution in Maunalua Bay, O'ahu, Hawai'i

Identifying stormwater areas on land that contribute the greatest amount of runoff in Maunalua Bay, Hawaii to mitigate runoff impacts, improve bay health, and benefit the community.

Group Members: Genevieve Chiong, Kristin Gill, Lauren Skube

Faculty Advisors: Samantha Stevenson

Clients: Mālama Maunalua

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