Co-PI, Mei Sato, Shares and Catches Fish with Sound

A large part of the NES-LTER project’s K-12 education efforts are through data sharing and supporting data literacy. Our Data Jam is just a part of that effort.

Co-PI Mei Sato and Education Outreach Coordinator, Annette Brickley, worked through several iterations of bioacoustic data visualizations and filtering to co-create a new product, a Data Nugget! In these free classroom activities, students are provided with the details of authentic science research projects such as ours, and then get to practice looking for patterns and developing explanations using the data. Our oceanographic data from the RV Endeavor acoustic sensor and towed Stingray sensor were something new and different for the Data Nuggets review team from Michigan State University, but we all learned about different ways of visualizing data and making it accessible to middle and high school students.

The “Catching Fish with Sound” Data Nugget can be found at https://datanuggets.org/2025/07/catching-fish-with-sound/. There are three different student versions (Levels A, B, and C), a great introductory profile about Mei and her research motivations, and answer key for teachers. Data Nuggets have been supported by the National Science Foundation since 2011.