Are Changing Sea Conditions Affecting Snow Crabs?

The world has been experiencing unprecedented climate change. Representations of the effects of this change can be found all around us. Ocean conditions are one of the key indicators of global temperature changes.

I have chosen to visualize this change in an interactive map. The goal of this visualiation is to analyze and compare the differences between ocean conditions between crab birthing periods. The map shows the waters surrounding Alaska. The most common snow crab harvest area is highlighted with a polygon. The available data layers include Sea Ice Concentration, Chlorophyll Concentration, and Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly. The data of each set is from April 2021 and April 2022.

SST Anomaly is compared against the average from 1985-1993

The layers can be toggled on/off independent of each other.

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Inspired by the recent news story of over 1 billion crabs missing from population counts / estimates

Data

Primary data sourced from NASA Earth Observations

Secondary data sourced from NOAA Climate Map Snapshots

Snow Crab Range/Info Alaska Department of Fish and Game

Methods

Visualization created with Leaflet.js, D3.js, and vanilla JS

github.com/GeoTIFF/georaster was the primary tool to load files

Data prep done in python (Jupyter Notebook) and GDAL CLI