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🌊 Science + Education

Dan Close · Aquatic Ecology & Restoration

An HSU Master's Thesis project at Cal Poly Humboldt Marine Sciences. Four single-page features on aquatic ecology, restoration ecology, and the scientific divers who actually rebuild reefs underwater. Built end-to-end in Claude Code in one sitting.

📚 HSU Master's Thesis 🏫 Cal Poly Humboldt · Marine Sciences 👤 By Dan Close 🤖 Built with Claude Code

▶ 1-minute video walkthrough · narrated by a Microsoft neural voice (Ava) · assembled by Claude Code

What's in it

Four single-file HTML features. Pure HTML, inline SVG, inline JavaScript — no build step, no npm, no tracking, no API keys. You can email or AirDrop any file and it just works.

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Aquatic Ecology

"From Molecules to Whales" — eleven orders of magnitude on one screen. Auto-cycling Scale of the Sea hero, vertical depth tour, click-to-learn modals on every layer, end-of-page quiz.

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Marine Restoration

A thesis-quality slide tour: coral fragmentation & microfragmentation, mangrove EMR, oyster reefs, seagrass meadows, kelp forests, salt marshes, and Marine Protected Areas.

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Freshwater Restoration

Beavers as ecosystem engineers, BDAs, dam removal, riparian zones, floodplain reconnection, eutrophication recovery, urban green infrastructure, constructed treatment wetlands.

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Scientific Diving

A 13-chapter narrative on the credentialed divers (AAUS, NOAA, Smithsonian) who actually rebuild reefs underwater — transects, photogrammetry, microfragmentation, lionfish culling.

Single-file HTML Inline SVG Offline-ready Self-narrating Mobile-perfect edge-tts (Ava) Claude Code Playwright ffmpeg

The science — what each feature actually covers

Aquatic Ecology walks the ocean's living hierarchy: phytoplankton produce roughly half of Earth's oxygen; copepods are likely the most abundant animal on the planet; apex predators stabilize entire systems via trophic cascade; jellyfish blooms tend to follow forage-fish overharvest.

Marine Restoration covers Acropora coral fragmentation, microfragmentation that gives slow-growing massive corals a 5-25× growth boost, Lewis (2005) Ecological Mangrove Restoration (hydrology-first), Crassostrea oyster reefs in Chesapeake Bay (under 1% of pre-colonial biomass), Zostera seagrass meadows (Virginia Coast Reserve has restored 9,000+ acres), kelp forest recovery via sea otter return, and the 30×30 MPA target by 2030.

Freshwater Restoration covers Castor canadensis as ecosystem engineers, Beaver Dam Analogs as low-tech restoration, dam removal (over 2,000 US dams removed since 1912 and accelerating), stream channel restoration, floodplain reconnection, eutrophication recovery, urban green infrastructure, and constructed treatment wetlands.

Scientific Diving is a 13-chapter long-form on the people who actually do restoration work underwater — AAUS-credentialed divers, transect tape and quadrat protocols, microfragmentation hand-work, photogrammetry rigs, lionfish pole spears, and the rigor (DSO oversight, dive plans, 100 hours of training, paired buddy diving).

How it was built — with Claude Code

Built end-to-end in Claude Code (Anthropic's AI pair-programming CLI · Opus 4.7)

~6,000 lines of HTML / CSS / JavaScript across 5 self-contained pages.

  • No build step. No npm, no bundlers, no tracking, no API keys. Every page is one HTML file you can AirDrop.
  • Hand-coded SVG. Every organism, every diver, every tool — molecules, microbes, copepods, photogrammetry rigs — drawn in code.
  • Self-narrating. Each page has a 🎧 button. A tiny local Flask service wraps edge-tts to call Microsoft's free Edge neural-voice backend (Ava) and serve cached MP3s on demand.
  • The 1-minute YouTube video was assembled by Claude Code too — Playwright headless Chromium recording at 1920×1080, ffmpeg concat / fade / audio mixing, all scripted.

Try it locally

One git clone away

Clone the repo, double-click index.html, you're in.

git clone https://github.com/nicedreamzapp/dan-aquatic-ecology
cd dan-aquatic-ecology
open index.html

Or open the live site hosted on GitHub Pages — no install needed.