Dawn Ericson Navarro is a naturalist artist specializing in marine animals and ocean ecology. As a naturalist and certified scuba diver, she pursued her interests in marine ecology with sketches in dive logs of the various animals she saw underwater. She then extended her work by creating a collection of final, accurately detailed scratchboard illustrations of the marine environment and its animals. Working with respected and world-renowned marine biologists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography UCSD, she combined each drawing with natural history text. This collection was to become the basis for a weekly newspaper column, "Ocean Encounters," which was syndicated by the Los Angeles Times Syndication for six years.