ProgramEarth

What does it actually take for land to hold more water? As part of Trellis Group Impact 2026, ProgramEarth joined Red Dot Ranch, Association of Ramaytush Ohlone and illumine.earth to bring sustainability leaders onto the land and look at that question through the lens of an 18-acre regenerative farm in Pescadero. The answer was not one intervention. Grazing can manage biomass. Biochar and humus soil can support water retention. Emerging approaches like chitosan may help remove contaminants. Native revegetation can influence infiltration and ecological recovery. Sensors and field observations help us understand how those interventions perform over time. Traditional Ecological Knowledge adds something equally important: context for understanding how water, plants, soil and stewardship have interacted across generations. But the bigger challenge may be economic. Many smaller farms and land stewards are capable of producing meaningful environmental outcomes, but the cost of monitoring, verification and participation can make water, carbon and biodiversity markets difficult to access. That raises a different question: What if the opportunity is not simply to scale projects, but to scale networks? An 18-acre farm can become a proof point for hundreds of surrounding acres. Monitoring infrastructure can be shared. Outcomes can be measured across parcels. And smaller land stewards may be able to participate collectively in projects that would be impractical to finance individually. For companies working toward water-positive goals, that could expand what a credible replenishment project looks like and who gets to participate in building it. Our latest article explores what we learned at Red Dot Ranch, including the role of biochar, shared environmental monitoring, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and community-scale bioremediation in building higher-integrity water projects. The question we’re interested in now: how do we make environmental outcomes rigorous enough to finance while keeping the people closest to the land at the center of how those projects are designed? Read the full article and join the conversation in the comments. photo credits: Jenny Montalvo Jahnavi Mange

Karla Tatiana, a researcher in Manaus spent two and a half years collecting data on the Rio Negro. She wanted to open-source it. That turned out to be much harder than pushing files to a repo: data-use agreements, documentation, structure, and making it usable by someone outside the original team. We took it on through Open Earth Hacks with GitHub. That work went from a hackathon to Web Summit Rio to COP30, and it now powers community health alerts for dengue and leptospirosis. The lesson for OSPOs and DevRel teams: a pull request matters only if the project it lands in stays alive. We're building open reference architectures so the next institution doesn't start from scratch. Next up: New York, São Paulo with UNEP, and DC AI Week. Come build with us 👇 https://lnkd.in/dyqC9WPu #TrellisImpact26 #EcologicalRestoration #TraditionalEcologicalKnowledge #RegenerativeLandManagement #Biochar #EnvironmentalMonitoring #WatershedRestoration #ClimateSolutions #IndigenousLeadership #Bioremediation #HabitatRestoration #Sustainability #agents

We just published an update on where ProgramEarth is headed next: nature agents, AI tools that help teams understand and manage land, water, and climate risk. It covers what we've learned from our community of 400+ technologists across 14 countries, why we want every hackathon project to leave something behind that others can build on, and our upcoming build in New York on November 7 with the NYC Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Community chapter. Take a read, and reach out if you'd like to get involved 👇

📣 Talk confirmada no KCD Brasil 2026! 🌱🤖 Building Nature Agents with Kepler and KubeStellar Como transformar dados ambientais fragmentados em inteligência contínua para orientar decisões financeiras? Instituições financeiras precisam compreender cada vez mais como o estresse hídrico, a degradação do solo, a perda de biodiversidade e as mudanças nos ecossistemas afetam os ativos, as infraestruturas, os projetos e as comunidades que financiam. No entanto, essas informações estão distribuídas entre sensores, imagens de satélite, bases de dados públicas, observações de campo e conhecimentos locais. Nesta palestra, Manisha P. e Pachi Parra apresentarão os chamados nature agents: fluxos distribuídos de Inteligência Artificial que transformam esses sinais em informações contínuas e específicas de cada localidade, apoiando atividades como análise de risco, seguros, monitoramento de portfólios e financiamento de projetos baseados na natureza. A sessão mostrará como o KubeStellar pode coordenar agentes distribuídos entre clusters de edge e cloud, enquanto o Kepler mede a pegada energética desses workloads. O resultado é uma arquitetura Cloud Native para inteligência ambiental que combina escalabilidade e eficiência energética, mantendo dados e processamento mais próximos das paisagens e comunidades que representam. 🎤 Manisha Priyadarshini — Cofundadora da ProgramEarth Tecnóloga indígena das comunidades Taíno e Santali, Manisha dedica seu trabalho ao desenvolvimento da próxima geração de tecnologias para a natureza. Como cofundadora da ProgramEarth, atua na promoção da saúde da terra e da água por meio de fluxos de trabalho baseados em agentes de IA. Sua trajetória conecta políticas climáticas e tecnologia. Iniciou a carreira como gerente de campanhas da deputada norte-americana Julia Brownley e, posteriormente, passou por organizações como o GitHub, apoiando iniciativas de transformação digital com instituições como NASA, NOAA e a Agência de Proteção Ambiental dos Estados Unidos. 🎤 Pachi Parra — Developer Relations & Community Manager Depois de trabalhar por vários anos como babá, Pachi começou a aprender programação enquanto construía conexões significativas na comunidade de desenvolvimento. Apaixonada por criar conteúdos acessíveis para pessoas iniciantes, acredita que uma carreira em tecnologia deve estar ao alcance de todos. Quando não está programando ao vivo na Twitch, assiste a animes, lê romances e lembra as pessoas de que elas são incríveis. 📍 Nubank Spark 📅 26 de setembro de 2026 🎟️ Ingressos disponíveis: https://lnkd.in/dcrCfApG Garanta seu ingresso e venha viver esse dia com a gente! 🚀 #KCD #KCDSaoPaulo #ComunidadeTech #CloudNative #DevOps #Comunidade #CNCF #SaoPaulo #Kubernetes #KubeStellar #Kepler #Sustainability #GreenTech #ClimateTech #AI

Thank you for including our paper on place-based intelligence in this important conversation on Indigenous Data Sovereignty in the age of AI with Kinray Hub: Indigenous R&D Think-Do Tank. We’re building toward a future where FPIC is embedded into digital systems, helping communities govern how their data is used and how value flows back to them. Join our waitlist as we streamline FPIC and help redefine data economies through relationship. Links in comments

There's no shortage of environmental data. Getting it into a workflow that someone can actually use is the harder part. On 2 September, ProgramEarth is joining us for a conversation about the next generation of climate and nature agents, and how nature-tech startups, data providers, researchers and technology builders can help make them more useful in the real world. We'll explore how high-quality, ground-truthed environmental data can support AI-powered decision-making across areas including water availability, flood risk, wildfire, drought, restoration planning, biodiversity and climate risk. We'll also hear from ProgramEarth about OpenEarth Hacks in New York that is bringing together students, universities, public-sector agencies, environmental organisations and technology partners to build environmental dashboards, APIs, geospatial tools and AI workflows using real environmental datasets. There's also an opportunity to explore how datasets, APIs, models and other tools could contribute to what developers are building. Interested in where nature, data and AI are heading? Join us. 📅 2 September | 16:00–17:00 CEST 🔗 Register in the comments. #NatureTech #EnvironmentalData #AIforNature #ClimateTech #OpenSource Paige Perillat-Piratoine Manisha P.

It’s kind of chic to know where your environmental data came from. Last week, ProgramEarth joined the Tribal Lands and Environment Forum for our session, “GIS, TEK, & Healing Waters for the Next Generation,” with Manisha Priyadarshini of ProgramEarth and Sativa Cruz of the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at NASA Ames. Across the week, Tribal Nations and communities including the THE MUSCOGEE (CREEK) NATION, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Spokane Tribe of Indians, Quapaw Nation, Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, and many more shared work spanning AI, GIS, data governance, contaminated-site cleanup, ecological restoration, and workforce development. A localized environmental data ecosystem is already taking shape. AI can now pull together satellite imagery, sensor data, agency records, soils, hydrology, contamination histories, and other ecological datasets much faster than we could before. But more data does not automatically mean a better model. Environmental datasets change. Conditions on the ground change. Agency records can lag. And without clear provenance or a way to validate an output against what is actually happening in a place, AI can confidently reason from information that is incomplete or no longer true. We talked about what happens when you bring together: 🌎 GIS + Earth observation 📡 Community-led environmental monitoring 🌱 Traditional Ecological Knowledge around native plants, soils + natural infrastructure 🎓 pathways for students into land and water careers Clear data provenance + active participation from the people stewarding ecological data could make nature models much easier to verify. A satellite layer can show vegetation change. A sensor can show a shift in water or soil conditions. A public dataset can show where contamination has been documented. That is where locally community adds context, validation, and a feedback loop to datasets that might otherwise remain static. Thank you to ITEP, the Tribal Waste & Response Steering Committee, and everyone who organized and contributed to TLEF for creating a forum where these pieces could be discussed as part of the same system. #TLEF2026 #EnvironmentalAI #GIS #NatureTech #DataGovernance #TraditionalEcologicalKnowledge

Ecosystems are restored by ecosystems of people. Thank you Climate Smart Communities Initiative (CSCI) for believing in the vision! 2 years ago, Korina Stark and I met at PNW Climate Week. Today, alongside the matriarchs and elders of Ute Mountain Ute White Mesa and Mexican Water Chapter of the Navajo Nation, we're beginning to rewrite the story of the San Juan Basin. And together with San Juan County Utah Government, University of Utah, and Utah's Division of Water Quality, we're beginning a deeper journey. As much as 50–60% of the land and water management workforce is expected to retire over the coming years. Projects like this don't just restore land, reduce wildfires, and better watershed management. They create the skills, technical experience, and pathways for the next generation to become the people who steward them next.

A satellite can't tell you a stream changed color after something happened upstream. A community member can. That's the premise behind ProgramEarth, a collective of Indigenous technologists who've connected 2.6 million acres to restoration work, from the Rio Negro to West Bengal to the Klamath River, by putting local knowledge at the center instead of treating it as a footnote to the tech. We asked Manisha P., their Interim Executive Director, where that instinct comes from. She traced it back to a question her grandmother asked years ago, while showing her the family's mangroves: "How do we help people see the value of a tree while it is living, rather than only after it has been cut down?" That question now lives inside ProgramEarth's tools too. Their platform TerraMark lets communities decide who can access their ecological data and on what terms, so the people closest to the land keep control of what gets shared and with whom. 📌 Read the full conversation on open-source infrastructure, hackathons as a bridge into nature tech careers, and what the sector keeps getting wrong about community-led monitoring. Link in comments. #NatureTech #IndigenousLedConservation #OpenSourceForGood #ClimateData #MemberSpotlight

How do we scale ecological data access at the speed of AI responsibly? That question is at the center of a new report we are publishing with Kinray Hub and ProgramEarth: Place-Based Relational Infrastructure. Nature models are becoming more powerful across conservation, restoration, and nature finance. AI is making it easier to find and combine the ecological data these models depend on, but it can also hallucinate when data is outdated or its source is unclear. Clear data provenance and active community participation could help reduce hallucinations and make AI outputs easier to verify instead of static or disconnected datasets. This is where Free, Prior and Informed Consent becomes critical. Consent and its conditions must travel with the data, including who can use it, for what purpose, and how communities can monitor use, withdraw access, and share in the value created. Our report explores how a Protocol 2-informed API could carry these community-defined rules into nature models, commercial platforms, and AI systems. It does not replace Indigenous governance. It helps make that governance enforceable downstream. Reciprocity is key to making this sustainable over the long term. Communities should be able to define what fair value looks like, whether through direct compensation, revenue sharing, investment in local capacity, attribution, or other forms of value return. When the people stewarding ecological data participate in the value it creates, everyone benefits. Communities gain resources to continue that stewardship, technology developers gain access to better-governed and more trustworthy data, and nature models become more grounded in the places and relationships they represent. With COP17 approaching, we hope to have more conversations about how biodiversity technology can scale access, responsibility, and value return together. If you will be in Yerevan this October, find the Kinray Hub team and ask us about the work. Credits to WarīNkwī Flores Manisha P. CJ Dolores Martín S. EveIyn Luu Eduardo Gomez Restrepo Kinray Hub: Indigenous R&D Think-Do Tank NaturaTech LAC Climate Collective Link in comments #IndigenousDataSovereignty #FPIC #ResponsibleAI #NatureTech #Biodiversity #DataGovernance #natureagents #FPIC #UNSDG #COP17