Groundwater is a critical water source for agriculture in hyper-arid regions, but increasing irrigation often depletes it faster than it can be replenished. This project will create an accessible, reproducible workflow using satellite data to analyze how agricultural water use relates to groundwater decline, helping researchers and decision-makers support more sustainable water management.
France’s vineyards are increasingly threatened by climate change and disease, leading to long-term losses of grapevines. This project will use high-resolution geospatial data to identify and measure missing vines, providing a scalable and reproducible approach to support vineyard monitoring and long-term management decisions.
Small-scale energy technologies like rooftop solar and electric vehicles are key to decarbonizing energy systems, but grid capacity to support these technologies may not be distributed equitably across communities. This project will develop an accessible workflow that combines grid infrastructure and socioeconomic data to help identify inequities and support a fairer transition to clean energy.
Wildfires are an increasing threat in the western U.S., and understanding community and ecosystem resilience is critical for reducing risk. This project will create an open-source tool that makes wildfire resilience data easier to access and use, helping researchers and practitioners support better preparedness and recovery.
Environmental reviews in California rely on accurate species data, but current workflows are time-consuming and difficult to reproduce. This project will create an automated system that streamlines species data management, helping biologists make more consistent and effective conservation decisions.
Hydropower is a key renewable energy source, but expanding it can harm rivers and ecosystems if not carefully planned. This project will estimate how much hydropower can be developed sustainably worldwide and share the results through an interactive tool to support climate and conservation goals.
California’s 30×30 initiative aims to protect biodiversity, but decision-makers need better evidence to guide conservation investments. This project will use bird observation data to compare biodiversity trends in protected and unprotected areas, helping inform more effective conservation strategies across the state.
Coral reefs around Mo’orea, French Polynesia, have not recovered as expected after a major marine heatwave in 2019. This project will identify what is limiting recovery and help inform strategies to support healthier reefs in the future.
This project enhances the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) by incorporating cumulative climate and environmental burdens, ensuring more equitable investment in the most at-risk communities. Using advanced geospatial analysis, it refines how disadvantaged areas are identified, strengthening the impact of the Justice40 initiative.
To enhance wildfire preparedness, this project develops a machine learning tool that predicts defensible space compliance using remote sensing imagery. By streamlining inspections for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, it enables more efficient resource allocation and real-time monitoring of wildfire risk.
This project harnesses high-resolution satellite data to uncover the greenhouse gas emissions of global fisheries, a major yet understudied contributor to climate change. By building an open-source data pipeline and interactive dashboard, it provides actionable insights for research, policy, and market-based strategies to reduce emissions at scale.
This project enhances marine conservation by standardizing habitat analysis within California’s Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) using spatial data and remote sensing. By creating detailed habitat maps and statistical comparisons, it provides crucial insights for researchers and policymakers evaluating the effectiveness of the MPA network.
This project enhances industrial decarbonization research by integrating greenhouse gas emissions and economic adjustments into the Industrial Assessment Centers (IAC) database. By developing a user-friendly interface with advanced visualization tools, it streamlines data access and supports more effective energy efficiency and emissions reduction strategies.
This project maps the shifting energy job landscape on California’s Central Coast as offshore wind development accelerates. By visualizing job gains and losses, it empowers labor, environmental, and community groups to advocate for a just transition to clean energy.
This project enhances California’s water data portal by assessing data quality, accessibility, and usability for improved drought management. Through gap analysis and automated visualization tools, it empowers water managers with actionable insights to better predict and respond to water shortages.
This project examines how Point Conception, a major biogeographic barrier, influences the range shifts of intertidal species in response to climate change. Using long-term ecological survey data and environmental projections, it will map species range edges and develop an interactive dashboard to support conservation efforts at The Nature Conservancy’s Dangermond Preserve.
Consumer demand for sustainable products is increasingly driving companies to consider the life-cycle carbon emissions of products being sold. Darn Tough, a Vermont-based sock manufacturer, aims to continue their reputation of environmental stewardship through aligning its operations with the 2030 carbon mitigation target set by its largest retailer, Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI). This project streamlines the calculation process with an improved computational method and builds an interactive visualization dashboard that allows the company to calculate yearly emissions and analyze the potential GHG impacts of changes in different fiber types for sock manufacturing.
Climate models are computer simulations that attempt to replicate the complex interactions between Earth’s systems. Improving the accuracy of climate models relies on evaluating uncertainty and minimizing error. The Climate and Global Dynamics Lab at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has recently carried out a Parameter Perturbation Experiment (PPE) to understand how the uncertainty of parameter values affected the output of their model, the Community Land Model (CLM); which simulates terrestrial processes. While the necessary data for the PPE has been collected, the data is stored in a collection of files that are difficult to interpret in their current form. The current website hosts visualizations for a portion of the PPE data, but contains no visualizations for data that more closely simulates Earth system interactions. These issues can be mitigated by developing an emulator with the internal complexity to isolate a one-to-one relationship between a parameter and climate variable, then display the predicted relationship. A publicly available emulator with these capabilities will allow scientists to easily interpret complex climate model outputs and offer insights on parameter-variable relationships that are not being predicted accurately by the model; which can lead to increased accuracy and precision of climate models.
The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden is restoring monarch butterfly habitats in the Los Padres National Forest. Using habitat models and accessibility tools, the team identified key areas for milkweed planting to support monarch populations and streamline future surveys.
Community engagement in planning is essential for effective and just climate adaptation. However, historically underserved communities are often difficult to reach through traditional means of soliciting public input. The Climate Adaptation Solutions Accelerator (CASA) through School-Community Hubs project identifies public schools as promising sites for building both community engagement and community capacity for climate adaptation.
