Emma Beretta is a passive acoustic data analyst at CIRES and NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) who uses open source software to build accessible visualizations about ocean sounds. A statistician by training, she is passionate about protecting Earth’s ecosystems and mitigating human impacts on vulnerable environments.

Beretta found her way to passive acoustics research after an internship at California Polytechnic State University in 2022. She was analyzing population count data from invertebrates who live along the Florida coast when she met Lecturer Maddie Schroth, who was starting an acoustics research project. The meeting sparked exciting new opportunities and relationships: Beretta helped Schroth test acoustic recorders, she joined fieldwork out of Morro Bay, California, and she met NOAA scientist, Lindsey Peavey and Ella Kim. Beretta went on to complete two summer internships with Peavey at the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and held a data manager position at the Cooperative Institute For Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) before landing at CIRES.

Beretta and her colleagues at CIRES and NOAA NCEI recently launched the U.S. Ocean Sound Monitoring and Condition Reporting website. Explore the new dashboard to learn more about ocean soundscapes in national marine sanctuaries across the United States. You can focus on particular frequencies or species to see how acoustics have changed through time — and you can compare sites. In the coming months, the team will continue to add more recording sites and data to increase the analysis capabilities of the website, and improve certain graphics to be interactive.

What do you work on at CIRES?

I helped create and currently maintain the U.S. Ocean Sound Monitoring and Condition Reporting website. My main focus for this project is to use open source software to create standardized graphics that visualize information about ocean sounds archived at NCEI, and enable easy comparison of soundscapes recorded at 29 listening stations deployed in 12 national marine sanctuaries (NMS) across three United States regions: Eastern, West Coast, and Pacific Islands.

What are you most passionate about professionally?

My driving passion that led me to pursue a career as an environmental data scientist is my desire to help preserve Earth's ecosystems and mitigate human's increasing impact on vulnerable species, caused by our advances in technology and increasing need for resources. I completed my B.S. in Statistics with a minor in Biology at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo in 2024. During my studies, I discovered the importance of data analytics in ecology and became eager to apply my coding and logical reasoning skills to environmental research. I am particularly interested in marine science research because of the unique data collection challenges inherent to the ocean. Because visual data is incredibly difficult to gather miles offshore and deep below the surface of the ocean, I have become fascinated by the passive acoustics field, using sound recordings to study the ocean and its inhabitants to bridge critical data gaps.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, which is about 30 minutes outside of New York City, but have moved around the United States quite a bit throughout my life. My parents are first generation immigrants from Italy who moved to the U.S. one year before I was born in Boston, Massachusetts. We then moved to New Jersey when I was two years old and the summer after my sophomore year of high school we moved to Redondo Beach, California. This last move was most impactful to my life but despite the challenges that came with it, I am forever grateful to my parents for having taken the leap to leave their country to pursue a better career and life for their kids.

What sport would you compete in if you were in the Olympics?

If I had the skills to be an Olympic athlete, I would love to participate in one of the skiing events, like ski mountaineering (skimo) or freestyle slopestyle skiing. I have loved skiing since I was little and even helped run my local ski club when I was getting my undergraduate degree. I currently work for CIRES from California as a remote employee, but proximity to the mountains is one of the many reasons why I am excited to move to Boulder this summer!