Where Are They Now?
2007 State Fellow Hugo Selbie

Contact:

Shauna Oh
Assistant Director
California Sea Grant College Program
La Jolla, CA
E.: shaunaoh@ucsd.edu
T.: (858) 822-2708

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Revised:

November 30, 2011

Ashley Blacow

Hugo Selbie

Former State Fellow Hugo Selbie is now a data analyst at NOAA's National Marine Protected Areas Center in Monterey, working as a contractor on the agency's ambitious MPA Inventory project, an effort to catalog and describe the nation's network of marine protected areas.

"On a day by day basis, I sit in front of a computer and gather MPA site-specific ecological, cultural and management data for this MPA database and run analyses on those data to create regional resource profiles of MPAs," Selbie says, explaining his role in expanding and improving the MPA Inventory geospatial database. "I like the fact that I am getting back to pure science and helping policy-makers manage MPAs more effectively."

Prior to his current position at NOAA, Selbie was the policy and outreach coordinator for the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, a long-term ecological monitoring program on the West Coast, commonly known by the acronym PISCO.

As a 2007 State Fellow, Selbie was part of the research team at the NOAA's Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. His main project for the year was to author a technical report and executive summary on the historical ecology of Monterey Bay. This unusual marine history project involved reading hundreds of historical documents, including 18th century captains' logs and explorers' journals, old newspapers, and the diaries and letters of fur-traders, fishermen and whalers, to glean insights into the abundances and sizes of marine animals, and patterns of marine exploitation, over the last several centuries.

"The fellowship gave me access to influential people in the Monterey Bay region," Selbie says. "I was able to make myself known and network with people. I am sure I would be out there dangling, if it had not been for the connections I made during my fellowship."

Selbie earned a master's degree from the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in 2007, and a bachelor's in marine geography from Cardiff University in Wales in 2003. As master's student, he developed educational and public outreach materials on shark conservation, and as part of his undergraduate field training, he studied water-quality issues at tilapia farms in Zimbabwe.

Be sure to check out this summary of Selbie's current work on improving the MPA Inventory.