Co-Design Environmental Stewardship
Partnering with Indigenous and local communities on land management by leveraging traditional ecological knowledge & technology
The Latest
- DSE partners with the Karuk Tribe’s Wildlife Team in northern California to co-design data tools that support the Wildlife Team’s wildlife monitoring and research goals.
- This includes co-designing two programs that help automate wildlife monitoring practices, which are fully owned and operated by Wildlife Team on local servers.
- Our co-published research in Ecology and Evolution with the Wildlife Team and former postdocs in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management provides recommendations on how to improve wildlife monitoring approaches in partnership with Indigenous communities.
Our Impact
Karuk Wildlife Team
With the Karuk Wildlife Team, we co-designed two software programs to help assist the Tribe's wildlife monitoring goals on their ancestral lands. Both programs are in active use and fully owned and operated by the Wildlife Team. One program, the Game Cam app, auto-sorts wildlife images collected via camera traps (examples pictured above right) for more efficient analysis, and the second automates data transfer between the Wildlife Team’s servers. Together, the programs enable the Wildlife Team to focus more internal resources on monitoring and science rather than manual data manipulation.
Data Visualizations for Community Members
We also recently developed poster visualizations that tell the story of Mâakamkuuk (“up-slope” mammals such as bear, elk, mountain lion, and deer) activity and movement fluctuations through the seasons. The posters will be displayed and shared in community spaces and at relevant events.
Publications
We co-published our first academic paper with the Karuk Wildlife Team in October 2025 that provides groundbreaking analysis on how the Wildlife Team’s traditional knowledge, research, and citizen-science efforts support elk restoration on their ancestral lands. Our research presents a potential model for how to improve wildlife monitoring more broadly in partnership with Indigenous communities.
Future Vision
Now that the Game Cam app has been migrated onto the Wildlife Team's local server, we continue to collaborate on new funding opportunities and visualization assets for Karuk community members.
We are exploring new international partnerships with Tribes and local communities to expand the scope of our work on biodiversity monitoring approaches beyond California.
Partner Feedback
“Thanks to Schmidt DSE's work on incorporating new sound identification models into the Wildlife Sound Hub, we will gain even more environmental information from the state’s acoustic monitoring efforts, and can more efficiently and effectively manage California’s diverse nature for the benefit of all.”
- Matthew Toenies, Senior Environmental Scientist, California Department of Fish and Wildlife
Call for Collaboration!
We are looking for:
- Environmental stewards and communities grappling with the challenges associated with data handling for land and biodiversity conservation, protection, and restoration.
- Creators of data governance standards for Indigenous/community land and biodiversity management.
- Interdisciplinary researchers working to define what digital and data sovereignty and data privacy mean in the context of community-based environmental stewardship.
We’d love to hear from you. Please reach out to Ciera Martinez: ccmartinez@berkeley.edu.
