One of Santa Barbara’s Best-Kept Scientific Secrets Turns 30

Ben Halpern, now the executive director of a global environmental research center based in Santa Barbara, first joined when he was a UC Santa Barbara graduate student in 1998. 

He was instantly hooked. The size and scale of the questions he could ask produced a scientific aroma he just couldn’t resist.

“It profoundly changed the trajectory of my career,” noted Halpern, a marine biologist who studied coral reefs around the world for 20 years. “We were changing the culture of science. It’s not an exaggeration to say that.”

In the time since he took the helm nine years ago, he’s repeatedly considered changing the center’s name. The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, or NCEAS, doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But, with the center now in its 30th year, there’s just too much weight that comes with it.

The UCSB-affiliated center flipped science on its face — encouraging a shift from siloed individual research to open, interdisciplinary work.

That’s why Halpern stuck around, even though, as a research scientist, he had to “fundraise [his] own salary,” he laughed. When he was promoted to executive director, “It was a dream come true,” he said. “I’m paving the way for others to have the same experience.

In 2008, Halpern became the lead scientist on the center’s Ocean Health Index, which measures the state of the world’s oceans using different criteria pieced together from global data: like biodiversity, clean water, and tourism. People can use it to track changes in ocean health over time and check which waters are in the worst shape due to various stressors. 

NCEAS scientists are now working on a similar index related to wildfire for the Western U.S. and Canada.

It’s the kind of thing they’ve done for decades: taking science’s individual puzzle pieces and putting them together to reveal big pictures — like the jigsaws in their downtown Santa Barbara headquarters, surrounded by ink-stained whiteboards and detailed scientific murals. 

“A lot of the work that happens here is global, but it’s nice to have projects like [the wildfire index] happening in our own backyard,” said Courtney Scarborough, NCEAS deputy director.  

Another local effort is underway at The Nature Conservancy’s Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve in Lompoc, where invasive ice plant—nicknamed “carpet weeds” for how they blanket the landscape — is choking out native species.

To help The Nature Conservancy restore the ecosystem, NCEAS is combining satellite, aerial, and drone imagery to produce the first-ever map of ice plant in Santa Barbara County, powered by artificial intelligence. It will guide the conservationists’ removal efforts, and could eventually scale to track the sprawling weeds worldwide.

On this global scale, Scarborough added, NCEAS was similarly the first to quantify plastic pollution and map marine protected areas — zones of the ocean that are off-limits to harmful human activity.

Like Halpern, Scarborough has worked there for more than a decade, starting as a post-doc fellow and staying in town after graduating from UCSB. But they’re not unique — the center has amazing retention rates, with some staff’s tenure stretching back to its genesis.  

“When we opened back then, in 1995, nobody really knew what was going to come next,” Scarborough said.

NCEAS, she gushed, was the very first synthesis center of its kind in the world — using existing data to draw new environmental discoveries — conceived with National Science Foundation (NSF) money. Other synthesis centers were modeled after it, but many have closed in the time since, not surviving past their NSF funding’s expiration date. That makes NCEAS also the longest-lasting center of its kind, as it has outgrown NSF and locked down other funding sources. 

“It’s a real testament to the influence we’ve had and the passion of the community to see NCEAS thrive,” Halpern said.

He noted that over the past 30 years, the center has had more than 11,000 people from 75 different countries come through its halls, bringing an “incredible intellectual community into Santa Barbara, and bringing awareness to what a jewel this town is.” In 2021, they even brought together 120 scientists from around the world for a brainstorming session about how to address the globe’s most pressing environmental questions.

But a lot of people tell Halpern, “I had no idea this thing existed.” He called it “one of S.B.’s and UCSB’s best-kept secrets.”

Weathering the Present, Embracing the Future

After branching into applied science, involving more people on the ground, the center’s next evolution is starting this year with an initiative called “AI for the Planet,” using advanced technology to help those in the field tackle issues such as the invasives at Dangermond.

The center wants to harness this “wild and crazy AI” and use it for environmental good, Scarborough said.  

The potential misuse of AI can be frightening, but the center intends to use it responsibly and employ its same tried-and-true practices — making science open, accessible, reproducible, and ensuring “everyone’s voices are being heard,” Scarborough added.

However, with a volatile, anti-intellectual administration at the helm of their homebase, the next steps can seem uncertain. 

The Trump administration is planning to gut federal science funding, rendering those sources unreliable. But Scarborough and Halpern remain optimistic. They got through the unprecedented-ness and challenges of COVID, Scarborough said, so they can get through the next four years. They hope that donors and foundations help fill the gaps that disappearing federal funding may leave. But despite any federal shortcomings, the center is keeping its momentum.

“We are going to come out of it ready to ramp back up,” she remarked.

Being in Santa Barbara helps. It’s an environmentally conscious community with a unique ecosystem (not to mention that there’s no shortage of happy hours near their downtown offices to get creative juices flowing). 

“I kind of think a lot of the reason why NCEAS has been so successful is because, like, everyone wants to come to Santa Barbara,” Scarborough chuckled.  Learn more about NCEAS through its 30-year impact report at nceas.ucsb.edu/news/celebrating-nceas-30th-anniversary.

On September 4, the center plans to celebrate its anniversary during Santa Barbara’s 1st Thursday Art Walk for a special 30-year rendition of their artists in residence program, which highlights the intersection between arts and sciences.