Researchers at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) are leading a project to develop forecasting tools to predict when, where and under what conditions great white sharks appear near a beach. The team set out to understand what fine-scale factors affect shark behavior at all life stages.

As of now, shark presence is still hard to predict. But some first steps toward that goal were shared in a report published in the Marine Ecology Progress Series after a two-year study at Padaro Beach in Carpinteria, California. The researchers used aerial drones to observe how shark presence varied with different oceanographic conditions. Water temperature, season and time of day seemed to correlate most with shark density off the coast, they found. These insights could inform shark conservation and beach-goer safety.

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