Co-Design Environmental Stewardship

The Problem

Since time immemorial Indigenous peoples and local communities have successfully stewarded ecosystems in accordance with their knowledge, innovations, and practices. At the same time, ever-catastrophic global greenhouse gas emissions and widespread deforestation have thrown the planet into a dual climate and biodiversity crisis. For example, in the last fifty years, the average size of vertebrate wildlife populations has dropped by about 73% worldwide. 

The Opportunity

In 2022 global and local leaders came together to establish the unprecedented Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and set bold targets to address this crisis. We agree with the global consensus: to effectively mitigate and reverse devastating biodiversity loss, we must center Indigenous and local leadership, incorporate traditional ecological knowledge, and leverage modern technology. 

Cutting-edge technologies for data processing and analysis (including AI) are becoming increasingly valued in land management, particularly under climate change. DSE is part of a growing worldwide effort to ensure emerging technology serves Indigenous and local communities, and their environmental goals and management practices. DSE’s current work in this space includes partnering with the Karuk Tribe’s Wildlife Team in northern California and Indigenous peoples in Costa Rica to co-design tools for biodiversity monitoring. 

Key Highlights

• Co-designing software tool, data platform, and data protocols for wildlife data analysis and land management decisions with the Karuk Tribe’s Wildlife Team in northern California.    
• Training and collaborating on Indigenous led research, tools, and protocols.     
• Led a side event at the global biodiversity conference COP16.    
• Prepared three relevant academic papers with collaborators to advance traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous digital sovereignty.    
• Beginning international collaborations, with a focus on communities in Costa Rica and other countries in Latin America.     

Our Impact

California

We are working with the Karuk Tribe’s Wildlife Team in Northern CA to develop an AI-powered visualization tool and broader data platform. This effort supports the Wildlife Team to sort and analyze camera trap data (pictured above) collected on their ancestral lands. We are preparing to develop and deploy computer vision in this pipeline given the Wildlife Team’s limited on-the-ground capacity. The tool uses AI to auto-sort camera trap images by species, which saves the Wildlife Team countless hours required to sort photos manually. This efficiency also ensures the Wildlife Team can spend more time on biodiversity analysis, management, and decision-making.

Importantly, the tool, scripts, the data passed through them (as well as the servers) are fully owned and solely accessible by the Wildlife Team and their selected collaborators to maintain sovereignty and privacy over their data. This partnership has been very significant in building our understanding of the space and practical considerations around Indigenous digital sovereignty. 

We are leveraging UC Berkeley’s open-source software Jupyter Notebooks, as well as past research and expertise from UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management to help with their biodiversity monitoring work.     

Another tool uses AI models to identify animal sounds, with a special focus on culturally significant, non-avian species (such as wolf). We used over 10,000 audio clips collected from field data to retrain 4 distinct classes of machine learning models, improving our ability to detect several species of insects, frogs, and mammals in California. We also developed a small open source application that will make it easier for researchers and communities to label local sound data and create custom models to improve species detection. This effort is part of a collaboration with the State of California and UC Berkeley’s Geospatial Innovation Facility. 

Finally, we are preparing three academic papers with the Karuk Wildlife Team. One paper provides groundbreaking analysis on how the Wildlife Team’s traditional knowledge, research, and citizen science efforts support elk restoration and presents a potential model for Indigenous-led conservation efforts worldwide. This paper will be submitted for peer review in early 2025. We are also producing a white paper with guidance on technical implementation of Indigenous digital sovereignty with Indigenous academic partners.   

Global Reach

We are growing relationships with more Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaborators who are working to advance Indigenous data sovereignty in global environmental stewardship. For example,  we are laying the groundwork together with a Costa Rican Indigenous community to use camera traps and sensing pipelines to monitor and steward culturally-relevant species. This work will contribute to educational curricula for local youth. 

In 2024 we also organized and led a side event at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP16)—the largest biodiversity conference to date—which included 190 participating countries in Cali, Colombia in October. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, President of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad, moderated the event on the intersection of environmental stewardship, traditional ecological knowledge, data science and AI, and Indigenous data sovereignty. This helped deepen our understanding of the field and laid groundwork for our Indigenous digital sovereignty and environmental stewardship work internationally.   

Above: DSE's Magali de Bruyn (third from right) and the directors of la Red de Adolescentes y Jóvenes Indígenas de Amazonas (the Network of Indigenous Youth and Young Adults of the Amazon) at COP16. Check out more COP16 photos on our blog!

Future Vision

We are continuing to co-design our tools and data analysis workflows with the Karuk Wildlife Team, as well as building data pipelines on their servers. We provide ongoing training and co-working sessions so that their team can fully utilize and refine the tooling.   

In 2025 and beyond we will continue strengthening collaborations with Indigenous communities in the Amazon and internationally. We are also excited to further support the work of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, which is active in the United Nations. Finally, we are hoping to convene academics, community organizers, and youth together in a working group on the technical implementation of Indigenous digital sovereignty for environmental stewardship and AI development. We are gearing up to host workshops on the topic at the United Nations’ COP30 in Brazil, which our team is looking forward to attending!