Marine ecology meets climate modelling

In early June 2025, CMSI sponsored a hands-on workshop at Bodega Marine Laboratory focused on using R to wrangle and analyze Earth System Model (ESM) output (AKA climate models). Designed to bridge the gap between complex climate datasets and practical use for marine ecologists, the workshop guided participants through the entire workflow of working with climate models: from downloading ESM data, to regridding and downscaling, bias correction with observational datasets, evaluating model accuracy, and making climate projections. 

By the end of the workshop, attendees could produce projections of sea-surface temperature off California, at a 0.25˚ spatial resolution, across two climate scenarios and two climate models from the CMIP6 suite. Participants include undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and researchers from BML, UC Davis, UCSC and UCSB, and we were fortunate to have expert instructors from UCSC and UCD main campus join for the training. 

Building on the success and enthusiasm of the event, the instructors are exploring the launch of a new workshop series focused on data science and R specifically for marine ecologists, to be held at both UC Davis and BML. These workshops aim to enhance data literacy and technical skills among the CMSI community. Potential topics include (i) introduction to Github and version control, (ii) working with netCDF file formats, (iii) wrangling observed ocean data (e.g., using data from the Bodega Ocean Observing Node), (iv) species distribution modelling and (v) developing RShiny apps or Quarto webpages for marine management purposes. If you’re affiliated with CMSI or BML and are interested in us developing or hosting one of these workshops, we’d love to hear from you!

Thanks to everyone who attended the workshop, and an even bigger thanks to CMSI for financially supporting the event. We had a blast!