By: Victoria Westover

Hello fellow Wrigley/scientific research enthusiasts! I’m Victoria Westover, a senior majoring in Journalism and Environmental Public Policy with a minor in Comparative Politics at the University of Southern California. With the generosity of the Wrigley Institute’s Summer 2021 Bauer award, I worked on a science communication project in the inaugural partnership between the Wrigley Institute and the California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW) — a dream come true!

A little bit about me before we dive into my summer project:

Driving the boat in the Sea of Cortez on the hunt for yellowfin tuna in June 2019

I felt a responsibility for documenting global environmental atrocities and preserving Earth’s ecosystems when I saw the harms of overfishing and environmental degradation first hand. I compete in an annual deep-sea fishing tournament in the Sea of Cortez. Over the past fourteen years, I gradually saw the Sea of Cortez turn into the world’s garbage can and suffer from anthropogenic harm. I was mortified that preventable human activities were destroying the environment and knew I wanted to dedicate my career to bridging the gap between science and policymakers through public awareness of environmental issues.

In high school, I worked with a team of students to renovate a warehouse and turn it into a functioning Innovation lab where we built and managed large-scale aquaculture, aquaponic and hydroponic systems. We even partnered with the CDFW to raise, tag and release Rainbow Trout.

The tilapia aquaculture system in the Innovation Lab at Edison Highschool in April 2018

Now as a senior in college, I am grateful to have once again partnered with the CDFW and help advance California aquaculture. But this time my work was incredibly different. I, along with my incredibly talented co-intern Alex Tse, worked under the supervision of USC Provost Postdoctoral Fellow Amalia Almada, PhD and the CDFW State Aquaculture Coordinator Randy Lovell to audit two state-run aquaculture websites: the department’s Aquaculture Homepage and the outreach site Aquaculture Matters.

Over the course of six weeks Alex and I analyzed the existing communications tools, content and engagement metrics for both websites to address content gaps and improve user engagement.

The general process we used for auditing both websites consisted of five steps:

1. Review the existing materials: Understand the website proposals, charters, design constraints and site content. Become familiar with the operations management of the websites to later make constructive and reasonable recommendations.
2. Narrow the Scope: Identify a specific purpose and set of goals for each site.
3. Identify Target Audiences: Identify target audiences including (1) audience needs and (2) desired user responses.
4. Analyze: Determine if content meets audience needs and helps facilitate or hinder intended user response.
5. Recommend: Identify how website features could be added, tweaked or removed to better meet the site’s goals.

For example, to narrow the scope of the analysis (step 2 of the audit), Alex and I had to determine how the two websites we are auditing function with the other aquaculture websites managed by the department. This meant identifying a specific purpose and narrow set of goals for each site, as shown below.

State Aquaculture Websites Graphic.

We determined that the overall purpose of the CDFW homepage is to provide information and materials to aquaculturists and stakeholders to answer the needs of the constituency. On the other hand, Aquaculture Matters is an outreach platform to accurately inform a variety of audiences about the world of aquaculture.

One of the recommendations Alex and I made for the CDFW Aquaculture Homepage was to incorporate a graphic that shows the steps aquaculturists should take and in what order to launch their own projects, including the exact agencies aspiring aquaculturists need to go through for project compliance. We found that creating a visualization of the steps needed to enter the aquaculture industry would help provide aquaculturists and stakeholders clear and easy access to regulatory information.

Example graphic of steps for aspiring aquaculturists.

And like the CDFW website says, aquaculture matters! Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing food production sector and it is a new path forward to sustainably meet the world’s growing demand for animal protein. Aquaculture can also be used to promote reproduction of wild populations and there is great potential to use aquaculture to create alternative fuel sources (such as using kelp for biofuel!).

An aquaculture agency’s web presence matters because effective communication between the government and the public is incredibly important as the public’s interest in aquaculture grows and the aquaculture industry expands in the future.

I am incredibly grateful for this internship which provided me a valuable opportunity to learn about and experience the inner-workings of developing aquaculture policy in California. I also was able to learn new skills for effective science communication, such as conducting a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis and modifying communication methods for specific target audiences.

Thanks for reading!

Summer Award made possible by the Bauer Family Endowed Scholarship Fund

By: Alex Tse

Hi everyone! My name is Alex Tse, and I’m a sophomore studying as a Business Administration major at USC Marshall with a minor in Environmental Studies at Dornsife. This summer, I received a Summer Environmental Award from the Wrigley Institute to support my internship on aquaculture and communications.

Myself visiting the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstones during a family road trip this past summer.

I’ve been so fortunate this summer to work under the supervision of USC Provost Postdoctoral Fellow Amalia Almada, PhD and the California Dept of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) State Aquaculture Coordinator Randy Lovell to audit two state-run aquaculture websites: the department’s Aquaculture Homepage and the outreach site ‘Aquaculture Matters’.

For those who may not be familiar, aquaculture is defined by NOAA Fisheries as “the breeding, rearing, and harvesting of animals and plants in all types of water environments”. Aquaculture provides a valuable food source for human environments, as about half of all seafood for human consumption is produced through aquaculture. When done right, aquaculture also contributes to environmental health by sequestering nutrients and cleaning up the water.

To communicate the benefits of aquaculture as well as to streamline the site visitor’s experience, I worked alongside my awesome intern partner Victoria Westover to tackle our projects head on, producing a massive deliverable outlining our work process on the audit. In it, we highlight the most effective changes that could be made to improve communications on the two websites.

A screenshot showing the CDFW Aquaculture Homepage and the Aquaculture Matters site that we performed our audit on!

I’m personally interested in the intersection of business and environmentalism/social good. I’d previously been heavily involved in my high school’s garden club and our developing aquaculture program. So performing this audit like a consultant on material that has fascinated me since high school was super exciting.

The final piece of the puzzle was to create and present our deliverable to Randy, our mentor in the CDFW, for approval. In doing so, we prepared a 30+ page deliverable, client presentation slides as well as a more general audience slide deck, many custom graphics and poster images, and finally, a wireframe mock-up visualizing the changes we envisioned for the site, alongside our comments for what we thought about the current iteration of it.

A piece of the final deliverable I created, the wireframe mock-up.

Throughout this process I’ve learned so much more about CA aquaculture and the importance it plays in today’s food ecosystem. In addition, the mentorship we’ve gotten from Amalia and Randy have helped us to grow professionally and give us the tools needed to work in environments like these in the future. The actual work we did auditing the website for the CDFW helped Victoria and myself learn new skills about conducting audits, and to employ new methods about how to concisely and efficiently present our findings to different target audiences.

I’d like to thank our mentors, Amalia and Randy, for their feedback and dedication towards our project, as well as Kathryn Royster, Jessica Giradot, Jessica Dutton, and the teams at USC Wrigley and the CDFW for their support for our work. Lastly, I’d like to thank Victoria for being such an awesome partner and collaborator—truly could not have done this without you! Thank you all for reading a bit about my summer work, and fight on!

Summer Award made possible by the Bauer Family Endowed Scholarship Fund.