Hannah Joss

About Hannah

Hannah grew up in Washington and California, spending most days outside but visiting the ocean only on occasions. At 17, she signed up for a marine conservation volunteer trip to Cambodia where she got scuba certified and began the steady slide into a state of ocean obsession. Moving to coastal San Diego for undergraduate studies at San Diego State University was the final push to fall in love with surfing, diving and overall ocean exploration. Although her degree was in Environmental Sciences, Hannah spent her spare time volunteering in Coastal Marine Ecology and Global Change research labs, diving to monitor nearshore research sites and deploying instruments to measure habitat productivity and gas exchange from ocean-atmosphere. She got herself on a research cruise monitoring the California Current onboard Scripp’s R.V. Sally Ride which cemented her appreciation for long-term ecological monitoring efforts.

After graduating, she worked for an environmental consulting firm in San Diego spending extensive time under or on the water, collecting ecological and physical data. After 4+ years with the company, Hannah was ready to engage in more analytical work and pursued a graduate program focusing her MSc. studies on geospatial and remote sensing of marine habitats. This pursuit took her to a remote part of northern California, at California Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Here she continued to pursue ocean activities in cold, sharky water and learned to utilize remote methods for monitoring marine habitats as well as programming to automate processing tasks. Over the summers (2022-2023) she worked as a contractor for United States Geological Survey on NOAA research vessels offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, monitoring mesophotic and deep-sea corals and their response from the 2008 Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill. Now Hannah is applying her knowledge of GIS and remote mapping methodologies to map the complex and fascinating marine habitats surrounding Palau.