Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is an insecticide that is resistant to degradation and can cause increased risks of cancer, premature births, developmental abnormalities, and neurological diseases in humans and animals. From 1947-1971 the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles was a dumping ground for the nation's largest producer of DDT. Industrial waste was discharged both through the Los Angeles County wastewater treatment plant, which was deposited nearshore on the Palos Verdes Shelf (PVS), and via ships that transported and dumped bulk waste in deeper waters. The recent rediscovery of offshore dumpsites off the coast of southern California has captured the attention of the public and raised concerns regarding consumption of contaminated seafood.

The California Environmental Protection Agency Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) currently issues a general statewide consumption advisory based on DDT, PCBs, and mercury for coastal locations and a limited number of site-specific consumption advisories, with a subset of commonly-caught species considered in these advisories. In order to improve consumption advisory accessibility and generate more localized predictions of DDT risk, SaferSeafood has partnered with Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations, who have collated fish and sediment monitoring data to understand the extensive human and ecological impacts resulting from legacy DDT dumping. Their current model examines factors that drive localized DDT risk in sport fish off the Southern California coast, and results were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

The goal of this project, SaferSeafood, was to expand on this effort by creating statistical models that predict fish DDT concentrations using factors like average sediment DDT concentration, capture year, and species-specific ecological characteristics such as diet and habitat. This project aims to educate the public and give users the autonomy to understand the risk and make informed decisions on their seafood consumption. The interactive element of this application allows users to access predicted concentrations of total DDT in seafood catch based on their location and the species of their catch. Official government consumption advisories are also be provided to the user sourced from OEHHA. It should be emphasized that this dashboard is a research project designed to educate and inform. The information provided here does not come from any public agency and we are not making health recommendations.

This application was developed as a Masters in Environmental Data Science Capstone project for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation.

This project was completed by a group of graduate students at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, UC Santa Barbara. Team members include Hope Hahn, Luna Herschenfeld-Catalán, Benjamin Versteeg, and Kate Becker with guidance from our Faculty Advisor Bruce Kendall and Capstone Advisor Carmen Galaz-García.