DataShoal has a roadmap page. Solid means shipped, the amber waterline marks where work stands today, and everything below it is planned. This post walks through it.
The project grows along two lines at once. One is capability: what we can responsibly say about a bay. The other is coverage: how many bays we can say it about. They move independently.
The capability ladder: four phases
Phase 1: Describe. What is happening across the bay right now, built entirely on public ocean data, with every reading sourced and its confidence qualified. This shipped in June 2026 for the three California bays: a weekly State of the Bay report for each, and a monthly dataset for researchers. Describing before predicting matters, because a forecast is only worth shipping once the readings underneath it are reliably collected and understood.
Phase 2: Forecast. Why conditions are what they are, and where they’re headed. This is underway now: weather and wave forecasts, ocean climate signals like El Niño, and the state’s closure status join the picture, feeding an interactive map, lease-level views, and email and text alerts. This is the current milestone.
Phase 3: Predict. What happens next on the farm itself. This phase brings in data that doesn’t exist in public feeds: growers’ own operational records, sensors on the lease, and satellite imagery, powering forward-looking alerts for mortality risk, blooms, and likely closures. It’s planned as a sequence.
Phase 4: Prescribe. What to do about it. Recommendations and integrated hardware close the loop from reading the water to running the day. Also planned as a sequence.
The coverage line: from California to Washington
Alongside the capability ladder, the project is expanding geographically. The first region, three California bays (Humboldt, Tomales, and Morro), is live and reporting weekly. The second is Washington’s inland sea: Hood Canal, South Puget Sound, and the San Juan Islands, in that build order. Those pages currently preview the public data sources we plan to bring in; they’ll come alive region by region as each source is checked and flowing.
The pattern repeats from there. Each new region starts at Describe and climbs, so a grower in a newly added bay gets the same qualified picture the first three bays got.
Why the ladder is strict
It would be tempting to skip to the exciting phases. We don’t, because each rung is the evidence for the one above it: you can’t forecast what you haven’t described, and you shouldn’t prescribe from a forecast you can’t defend.