Until recently, a Massachusetts shellfish warden had to rely on a neighbor’s rain gauge to decide whether to close a harvesting area. The typical workflow was a phone call, jotting down the measurement, and then issuing a closure notice via paper signs, phone calls, or word‑of‑mouth at the marina. This low‑tech, trust‑based system does not scale.\ \ According to the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) 2024 Annual Report, shellfisheries generate over $441 million in ex‑vessel value across 738 classified growing areas, each subject to overlapping state and municipal jurisdictions. Thousands of recreational permit holders add further complexity, exposing the limitations of the legacy process.\ \ With support from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J‑WAFS), MIT Sea Grant researchers set out to bridge the gap between existing data and usable information. The project, proposed by Professor Michael Triantafyllou, aimed to build a cloud‑based application that would streamline decision‑making for managers, stakeholders, and individual fishers, supporting shellfish productivity, safe consumption, and coastal economic vitality. The platform needed to scale from state‑level agencies overseeing hundreds of growing areas down to a single permit holder deciding whether to drive out that day.\ \ The result is Seashell, a system that sits at the intersection of big data, natural resource management, and the “blue economy.” It runs on a PostgreSQL database hosted on Amazon Web Services and is designed to be exportable—towns or states can deploy it on their own servers. Rather than replacing existing tools, Seashell pulls data via APIs from a long list of sources: NOAA tide stations, satellite feeds for sea‑surface temperature and chlorophyll‑a, local weather networks, and DMF’s own GIS.\ \ A defining trait of Seashell is its town‑driven design. In 2023 the team conducted a regional assessment, gathering 312 survey responses and 122 follow‑up focus‑group participants. The biggest surprise was how little end users wanted to interact with data. They preferred a minimal interface that automatically loaded their location and answered three key questions: Is the area open? What’s the tide? What’s the water temperature? This insight reshaped the public UI around geolocation and ultra‑simple navigation, especially for mobile use.\ \ Town needs varied widely. Many municipalities operate with one or two staff members handling all permitting and enforcement, prompting the creation of a “Ways to Water” feature that routes users to the nearest access points, shows parking availability, boat ramps, and travel time. One officer even requested multilingual support, which the team is now adding via built‑in translation.\ \ The relationship with DMF differed. While towns could adopt new tools quickly, DMF moved more deliberately and preferred to keep its polygon data in ArcGIS. The team therefore synced Seashell to DMF’s existing records through an API and built automatic alerts for any data changes, preserving DMF’s control while still providing towns with up‑to‑date information. The administrative interface also ingests real‑time environmental data and applies town‑configured rules to recommend closures, effectively replacing the old rain‑gauge phone call and shrinking the lag between official notices and public awareness.\ \ Seashell officially launched at the 2026 Northeast Aquaculture Conference in Portland, Maine, and will be presented at the Massachusetts Shellfish Officers Association meeting in October. Wider town adoption is expected to reduce confusion caused by neighboring municipalities using disparate systems. As project lead Ben Bray notes, shellfishing is one of the few bipartisan ocean issues, intertwining economic value, food security, and cultural traditions—including Indigenous practices that predate current regulations. The team is now exploring extensions into commercial fisheries and landing‑data reporting, and argues that the same architecture could serve any natural‑resource management problem with geospatial and jurisdictional dimensions, such as wildlife management or water‑quality monitoring.\ \ Review: By leveraging cloud infrastructure, API integration, and a user‑centric minimalist UI, Seashell transforms fragmented environmental and regulatory data into actionable insight, boosting management efficiency and public trust for Massachusetts shellfisheries while offering a replicable blueprint for broader natural‑resource governance.