IDSC Welcomes Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez to the Earth Systems…
Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez joins IDSC as a Core Faculty Member in the Earth Systems Science program area. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Marine Technology Life Sciences & Seawater Complex at the University’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.
Bridging Quantitative Data About Environmental Change and Human Behavior
When Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez was a kid, his family moved from Mexico City to a new housing development on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. Far enough from the spring breakers in Cancun and long before the coastline was bulldozed to create miles of all-inclusive resorts, Villaseñor-Derbez soaked up every bit of the wilderness that surrounded him.
He explored the Mayan ruin nearby, rode bikes with his brothers and friends, and spent each afternoon snorkeling in the still-pristine waters just a block from his house. But as he inspected the fish and eels he found in tidepools and gathered around corals, he didn’t know what he was looking at.
Then, one summer, he took a job at a local dive shop that wouldn’t pay him in cash but offered him free scuba diving certification lessons and daily dives instead. He jumped at the chance. By the end of the summer, his boss realized how much Villaseñor-Derbez appreciated the ocean, so he gave him a guidebook of Caribbean fish.
“I was like, ‘Oh, this blue fish is called an Indigo Hamlet and this striped fish is called a French Angelfish and there’s this new fish called the Lionfish which wasn’t supposed to be here but now it’s here,’” he said while showing off the dog-eared copy of the guidebook he still keeps at his desk. “It was my first introduction to marine science other than looking at Discovery Channel documentaries.”
Before long, Villaseñor-Derbez was studying oceanography and went on to earn his PhD in Environmental Science and Management from UC Santa Barbara. Now he’s bringing his unique research to the University of Miami as a joint appointment between the Frost Institute for Data Science & Computing (IDSC) and the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.
Villaseñor-Derbez’s work has focused on the interplay between humans and the marine environments they depend on, using modeling and revolutionary vessel-tracking data to design and evaluate policies that provide enough resources to humans while protecting the ocean’s natural resources.
“The thing I was most interested in was trying to understand how the environment shaped the way we interacted with it, whether you fish or you dive or extract oil or tourism,” he said. “The environment gives you a set of cards and you play them one way or the other and eventually what we do feeds back into the system and alters it.”
Ben Kirtman, the director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine & Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) and the deputy director of IDSC, is excited to have Villaseñor-Derbez on board because he can take the forecast climate models that Kirtman and his team create and apply them in real time to decisions made by fisheries, governments, and environmental agencies.
For example, recent work(1) by Villaseñor-Derbez looks at how small-scale fishers have been, and will continue to be, exposed to intense marine heatwaves due to climate change.
“People who are good at [bridging the worlds of
quantitative physical information about climate systems
and human behavior] are very rare.”
“What I think Juan Carlos brings to the table is the bridging of quantitative physical information about climate systems and human behavior,” Kirtman said. “People who are good at that, bridging those two worlds together, are very rare.”
Part of what makes Villaseñor-Derbez unique is his grasp of the marine environment combined with his ability to code. The master’s and PhD programs at the University of California-Santa Barbara where he studied didn’t offer advanced coding courses, so he and other students started meeting to teach themselves. They ended up creating the EcoDataScience study group to swap data science tools they’d picked up and apply them to the marine data they were using in their classes and research.
Armed with the ability to analyze massive amounts of data, Villaseñor-Derbez turned his attention to the fishing vessels that work the world’s oceans. He wanted to track each vessel to see how their behavior adjusted to the implementation of one of the world’s largest marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean. He tapped into a database maintained by Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit organization that collects the “pings” that very large vessels continuously send out as part of a global anti-collision program called the Automatic Identification System.
The results(2) were striking. Villaseñor-Derbez was able to watch how vessels avoided the large swaths of newly protected waters, signaling a clear conservation win. But the vessels didn’t stop fishing. They simply moved to the high seas, an area beyond the reach of national rules and regulations.
“We can now see how humans interact with and respond to
changes in the marine environment and policy landscapes
at an unprecedented scale and resolution.”
The data also opened a window into how boating fleets around the world operate, from Mexican fishing vessels changing their behavior when they receive (or lose) fuel subsidies to freighters avoiding pirates(3) off the coast of Africa.
“We can now see how humans interact with and respond to changes in the marine environment and policy landscapes at an unprecedented scale and resolution,” he said.
Now at UM, Villaseñor-Derbez is hoping to track far more vessels around the world and extract even more insights based on their movement patterns, a task that will require IDSC’s supercomputers and experts in artificial intelligence and machine learning. He wants to predict how much fish a vessel is harvesting based on their movement patterns and location. And he wants to track fishing vessels that aren’t required to send out pings by using indirect methods, including satellite observations of the bright lights they use at night or the reflections from their metallic surfaces.
“One of the things I am hoping to do is to blend different technologies to validate these ‘indirect’ approaches, and to better understand spatial gaps in coverage and their implications,” he said.
He’s also excited to expand existing collaborations with UM faculty and explore new ones. Villaseñor-Derbez has spent years collaborating with Renato Molina, an assistant professor at the Rosenstiel School who studies the economics of natural resource extraction. And he’s eager to meet Gabriel Reygondeau, another joint appointment between IDSC and the Rosenstiel School, who is creating computational models to estimate the location of every marine species in the world’s oceans and predict where they are moving. “There are interesting parallels,” he said.
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