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 we recently installed the Wildlife Team’s local servers.
- In late 2025 we co-published research in Ecology and Evolution with the Wildlife Team and former postdocs in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management on how to improve wildlife monitoring approaches in partnership with Indigenous communities.
- In parallel, we are improving and significantly scaling Soundhub: a bioacoustic data tool to help the state of CA accomplish climate and biodiversity monitoring goals.
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.
Research 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.
Soundhub
Soundhub is a remarkable web tool that identifies bioacoustic sound data, or animal sounds. Bioacoustic data is critical for understanding wildlife abundance and distribution, and can signal changes in environmental health over time. Importantly, this data informs conservation decision-making. Soundhub will provide the state of California with an automated platform that can passively collect, sort and classify data, resulting in terabytes of audio, rather than relying on active observation in the field. This provides an exciting and time-saving approach to data collection at scale.
We are partnering with the UC Berkeley Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF) and California Department of Fish and Wildlife to expand Soundhub so that it becomes the official home for all bioacoustic data across California's 80 Sentinel Sites. As one of many collaborators on this project, our role is to develop targeted AI models to identify anthropogenic sounds (e.g., vehicle noise), natural environmental sounds (e.g., wind), and vocalizations from frogs, birds, and other species of interest. These sites are in specific geographic areas where long-term, standardized monitoring and instrumentation is installed and maintained to accomplish state climate and biodiversity monitoring goals.
Future Vision
DSE and the Karuk Wildlife Team will work together on the Game Cam app’s iterative development, deployment, and integration for real-time use. In parallel, together we will host more data visualization workshops and create more educational posters and graphics that promote solutions to climate change to broader communities.
We are exploring new international partnerships with Tribes to expand the scope of our work on biodiversity monitoring approaches in California.
In parallel, we are energized by Soundhub’s enormous potential to inform conservation approaches statewide and globally. We envision this tool will become a first-class source of bioacoustic data for countless impactful use cases.
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.
