Let's Not Boil the Ocean

California Fisheries & Ocean Climate

The ocean shows up in the catch, years later.

A warm or cool year in the Pacific decides whether a generation of fish survives its first season. Those survivors only reach a boat once they have grown — so the honest comparison is not this year's catch against this year's ocean, but this year's catch against the ocean of several years earlier.

This project makes that delay visible. Pick a species, slide the lag, and watch the relationship between ocean conditions and landings, value, or price per pound respond.

Open the explorer → Want the story behind the dashboard? →
76
species
1980–2025
water years
0–10
lag years tested
58 / 18
warm- vs cool-leaning
19
with expert CVA scores

What this answers

  • Does a fishery track ocean conditions — and at what delay?
  • Do those swings carry through to ex-vessel value and dock price?
  • Which species are most climate-sensitive, and which barely respond?

Who it's for

Fisheries scientists, managers and commercial fishermen The explorer, built for readers who already hold the domain context and want to interrogate the data directly.
Students, business readers and the climate-curious The storytelling view, which teaches the lag idea from scratch before handing over any controls.

Where the data comes from

Commercial landings, ex-vessel value and price per pound from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, 1980–2025.

Ocean conditions from the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI), NOAA.

Expert climate vulnerability scores from the California state CVA (Frawley et al. 2025, PLOS Climate), covering 34 state-managed species, 19 of which appear in this catch record.

A correlation points to a relationship worth studying, not a cause. Catch records also carry fishing effort, quota changes and market shifts that no ocean index attempts to explain.

Sasha Schaps, Kristine Lesyna and Pratham Rana — UC Berkeley MIDS, DATASCI 209 final project.
Explorer · The Ocean in the Catch