Santa Barbara Municipal Airport

Goleta Slough State Marine Conservation Area (SMCA) is a marine protected area in Goleta in Santa Barbara County on California's south coast. The SMCA covers 0.25 square miles (0.65 km2). The SMCA protects marine life by limiting the removal of marine wildlife from within its borders. Goleta Slough SMCA prohibits take of all living marine resources except for take pursuant to routine maintenance, dredging, habitat restoration, research and education, maintenance of artificial structures, and operation and maintenance of existing facilities in the conservation area per any required federal, state and local permits, or activities pursuant to Section 630, or as otherwise authorized by the department.

The Goleta Slough is an area of estuary, tidal creeks, tidal marsh, and wetlands near Goleta, California, United States. It primarily consists of the filled and unfilled remnants of the historic inner Goleta Bay about 8 miles (13 km) west of Santa Barbara. The slough empties into the Pacific Ocean through an intermittently closed mouth at Goleta Beach County Park just east of the UCSB campus and Isla Vista. The slough drains the Goleta Valley and watershed, and receives the water of all of the major creeks in the Goleta area including the southern face of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The Santa Barbara Airport has the largest border on the slough and contains the largest part of the slough. UCSB, Isla Vista, the City of Goleta and other unincorporated areas of the county, including the landward bluffs of More Mesa, surround and encompass the rest of the slough. The Goleta Slough was impacted by two events of the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century. The first was the heavy grazing by cattle on the surrounding foothills and mountainsides followed by wide-ranging grassfires, heavy rains in 1861/62, and flooding which caused so much erosion and deposition of sediment in the mouths of the creeks emptying into Goleta Bay that most of the bay became silt-filled salt marsh in just a couple of years. The second event was the conversion of the marsh and remaining bay into a military airbase during World War II. The fill material was obtained by reducing the rest of Mescalitan Island which provided the material to fill the airport and the surrounding area. The former location of Mescalitan Island now contains a sewage treatment plant. While no longer having a regularly navigable mouth, nor depths in most places suitable for anything except canoes, kayaks, and very small boats, the slough remains a very important area of vital wetlands, salt marsh, and estuarian creeks. "The Goleta Slough wetlands ... are fragmented along the coast from More Mesa to UCSB Storke Campus". The Goleta Slough Ecological Reserve is administered by the Calif. Dept. of Fish and Game. The Slough contains approximately 430 acres (1.7 km2) of wetland habitat (including the 360 acres (1.5 km2) ecological reserve and 14.8 acres (60,000 m2) at Storke Campus). The approximate historic area was 1,150 acres (4.7 km2)."The primary function of the Ecological Reserve is to provide habitat for wildlife and a setting for educational and research activities. Public utility and transportation corridors traverse the wetlands while airport runways, a sewage treatment plant, a power generation station, and light industrial facilities are constructed on filled portions of the marsh."

Mescalitan Island is a mesalike island located about 10 miles (16 km) west of Santa Barbara near the outlet of the Goleta Slough into the Pacific Ocean.

The AlloSphere is a research facility in a theatre-like pavilion in a spherical shape, of opaque material, used to project computer-generated imagery and sounds. Included are GIS, scientific, artistic, and other information. Located at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) the AlloSphere grew out of the schools of electrical engineering and computer science, and the Media Arts & Technology program at UCSB.The AlloSphere is housed at UCSB California NanoSystems Institute building, "CNSI," or Elings Hall, a 62,000-square-foot (5,800 m2) facility that opened in 2007. The AlloSphere is intended to integrate technology and media.The AlloSphere includes a three-story cube that has been insulated extensively with sound-absorbing material, making it one of the largest echo-less chambers in the world. Within the chamber are two hemispheres of 5 meter radii, made of perforated aluminum. These are opaque and acoustically transparent.There are 26 video projectors, to create as much of a field of vision as possible.The loudspeaker real-time sound synthesis cluster (140 individual speaker elements plus sub-woofers) is suspended behind the aluminum screen resulting in 3-D audio. Computation clusters include simulation, sensor-array processing, real-time video processing for motion-capture and visual computing, render-farm/real-time ray-tracing and radiosity cluster, and content and prototyping environments.The AlloSphere was developed by a team of scientists, led primarily by Professor JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, a professor in the field of Composition, of the Media Arts & Technology Program of UCSB.

The Center for Spatial Studies and Data Science (@spatial) is a research center at the University of California, Santa Barbara built on a rich legacy of providing visionary and interdisciplinary leadership in geographic data science. Formerly named the Center for Spatial Studies, @spatial was founded in 2008 by Michael Goodchild, and focuses on spatial thinking across domains, spatial intelligence, geoinformatics, geographic information science, and geographic information systems. Founded on values of excellence and inclusion, the mission of the Center for Spatial Studies and Data Science is to serve the UC Santa Barbara campus, the local community, and society by accelerating scientific discovery, education, and access to actionable solutions. The Center hosts speakers, workshops, and visiting researchers as well as the annual Specialist Meeting that brings global experts together on emerging topics in spatial data science to fuel discussion and set research agendas. The Center consists of core researchers engaged in center management and initiatives, affiliate researchers across UC Santa Barbara interested in participating in Center activities, a Trainee Network of post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduate students, support staff, and valued external partners. Community engagement and outreach is a priority of the Center, with efforts including the Earth + Humans podcast about the challenges brought on by human’s interactions with the environment and the Community GIS Initiative, which aims to increase access to GIS solutions by creating a pathway to those who have GIS skills.

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB), is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California, United States. It is part of the University of California university system. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an independent teachers' college, UCSB joined the ancestor of the California State University system in 1909 and then moved over to the University of California system in 1944. It is the third-oldest undergraduate campus in the system, after UC Berkeley and UCLA. Total student enrollment for 2022 was 23,460 undergraduate and 2,961 graduate students.UCSB's campus sits on the oceanfront site of a converted WWII-era Marine Corps air station. UCSB is organized into three undergraduate colleges (Letters and Science, Engineering, Creative Studies) and two graduate schools (Education and Environmental Science & Management), offering more than 200 degrees and programs. UCSB is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and is regarded as a Public Ivy. The university has 10 national research centers, including the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. According to the National Science Foundation, UC Santa Barbara spent $235 million on research and development in fiscal year 2018, ranking it 100th in the nation. UCSB was the No. 3 host on the ARPAnet and was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1995. Current UCSB faculty includes 6 Nobel Prize laureates, 1 Fields Medalist, 39 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 27 members of the National Academy of Engineering, and 34 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The faculty also includes two Academy and Emmy Award winners and recipients of a Millennium Technology Prize, an IEEE Medal of Honor, a National Medal of Technology and Innovation and a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

La Patera (Spanish for "The Place of Ducks") was a historical locale in what is now the area of Goleta, California. Prior to European settlement, the area was inhabited by the Chumash, who had a settlement in the area named Saspilil. The Portolá expedition reached the area in August 1769 and gave it the name Laguna, but this was later changed to La Patera owing to the abundant ducks inhabiting the area's wetlands.According to Yda Addis Storke's Memorial and Biographical History of the Counties of Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura, California (1891), the name La Patera referred to the district comprising the Goleta valley west of Santa Barbara and east of the Rancho Cañada del Corral. Three land grants lay in this area: the Calera or Los Positas, 3,281 acres granted in 1843; Rancho Goleta, 4,440 acres; and Dos Pueblos, 15,535 acres.

Direct Relief (formerly known as Direct Relief International) is a nonprofit humanitarian organization whose mission is to improve the lives of people in poverty or emergency situations by providing the appropriate medical resources. The charity provides emergency medical assistance and disaster relief in the United States and internationally. The organization is headed by an independent board of directors and its president and CEO, Thomas Tighe.

Goleta Beach is a region of coastline located near Goleta, California, just east of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) campus. A portion of the shore of Goleta Bay is managed by the County of Santa Barbara, as the Goleta Beach County Park (GBCP). The beach itself is partly man-made as sand was spread onto an existing sandspit in 1945. The beach is a seasonal habitat for migrating shorebirds, including the snowy plover, an endangered species, and is occasionally closed due to nourishment efforts.

Goleta station is a passenger rail station in the city of Goleta, California. It is served by the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner; it is the northern terminal for three of those round trips. Trains terminating in Goleta are stored on a storage track adjacent to the station. Goleta station is served by ten Amtrak Pacific Surfliner trains (five in each direction) evenly spaced throughout the day.In Fiscal Year 2022, 52,365 passengers boarded or detrained at Goleta station.

The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) is a research institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. KITP is one of the most renowned institutes for theoretical physics in the world, and brings theorists in physics and related fields together to work on topics at the forefront of theoretical science. The National Science Foundation has been the principal supporter of the institute since it was founded as the Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1979. In a 2007 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, KITP was given the highest impact index in a comparison of nonbiomedical research organizations across the U.S.

The College of Engineering (CoE) is one of the three undergraduate colleges at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As of 2021, there were approximately 150 faculty, 1,650 undergraduate students, and 750 graduate students. According to the Leiden Ranking, engineering and physical sciences at UCSB is ranked #1 among public universities for top 10% research citation impact. According to the National Research Council rankings, the UCSB engineering graduate research program in Materials was ranked #1 and Chemical Engineering ranked #5 in the nation among public universities.