Over the summer of 2023, I was lucky to be selected as a NOAA Pacific Islands Science Center Young Scientist Opportunity Intern. PYSO Intern for short.
Working under Dr. Jonathan Whitney, Dr. Jamison Gove and Andrea Schmidt; I worked to support analysis of large amounts of eDNA data collected during a cruise to assess biodiversity of shallow-water coral reefs in West Hawaii. Over the course of my internship, I was tasked to compile a number of sources to create a list of Marine Fauna localized to the Hawaii Exclusive Economic Zone. The goal of this list was to create the first (that we were aware of) comprehensive list of marine fauna so we could have a sort of check-list for use in verification of data. Data were pulled in from a number of sources including the Bishop Museum, Invert-E-Base, Ocean Biodiversity Information System, Lifewatch, as well as various experts in their respective fields. Most of the analysis was completed in R, with a large helping hand from the World Registry of Marine Species database. Data and code used for analysis can be found on this GitHub repository as well with some notes about the approach to processing data and additional information.