offtrailstudio

For fans of the NYT Spelling Bee looking for another level, Cubic Word is a Rubik's Cube mashup. There's a new puzzle every day.

We made a map of facilities with Clean Water Act discharge permits (NPDES permits), colored by compliance status, synced from EPA's dataset every 2 weeks.

The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) is a permit program established as part of the Clean Water Act. Facilities dumping into a body of water are required to have a permit and to periodically submit discharge water reports. A "violation" on the map means a facility exceeded the limits in its own permit or failed to submit a report.

Some specifics:

Data comes from EPA's ICIS-NPDES bulk exports, synced every 2 weeks.

There's ~550k facilities registered nationally.

We built a detailed view showing each facility's violation history (allowed limit vs. actual amounts for each pollutant, by quarter)

I was curious to know how much funding is deployed to conservation efforts near me. I started by pulling a list of organizations using conservation-related tax codes, and cross referencing with the Land Trust Alliance and a few other sources. Financial records for 501(c)3 non-profit organizations in the U.S. are publicly accessible. So, once I had a list of organizations, I was able to fetch recent financial records for all organizations. I then plotted all funding values on the map using the organization's location.

The largest organizations are active all over the world, so their values should be excluded from any sort of local analysis. The area near DC, for example, shows billions in funding due to organizations such as the Nature Conservancy.

Curious to hear what y'all glean from this. Is there anything you'd like to see included in the map?

The Rights of Nature movement recognizes ecosystems as legal entities, instead of as a collection of resources to be managed. Ecosystems around the world are gaining legal personhood, with human guardians being appointed as trustees.

Speak for the Trees is an experimental project that explores how AI might support the Rights of Nature movement. If equipped with data about an ecosystem and capital to act, what actions might an agent take to support an ecosystem and its guardians?

A wood bank is a volunteer-led effort to provide free firewood to folks that are struggling to heat their homes. While increasingly common throughout New England, there are still many communities without this resource. Most wood banks store inventory in one place, requiring everyone to travel to that location. Local Axe is a 'distributed' model where volunteers process and store their own supply, and requests are matched to the nearest volunteer. This is similar to how community fridges helped better distribute the resource that food pantries provide.