Our Funding Partners and History

We are grateful to the organizations listed below, as well as to grants and collaborators not named here, for helping sustain Dendra through funding, stewardship, contracts, and partnerships.

California Department of Fish & Wildlife

The California Department of Fish & Wildlife (CDFW) Wildlife Diversity, Science Institute, Lands, and Cannabis Programs have worked together to establish sentinel sites on select Wildlife Areas and Ecological Reserves across the state. These sites were chosen to reflect the wide range of climate conditions and ecosystem types in California. The goal is long-term climate and biodiversity monitoring. These have become founding parts of the California Sentinel Sites for Nature network.

Cannabis Program

The Cannabis Program developed the protocols and has provided funding.

Lands

Lands has provided the sites and hosts the monitoring.

Science Institute

The Science Institute deployed and maintains the weather stations working with Dendra.

Please see our article on California Sentinel Sites for Nature to learn more about collaborations between these programs.

National Science Foundation

EarthCube

EarthCube was a community-driven program between NSF Geosciences & Cyberinfrastructure to transform research in the academic geosciences. The program aimed to create a well-connected environment to share data and knowledge in order to accelerate our ability to understand and predict the Earth system.

Grant #2126386

“EarthCube Capabilities: Reducing Time-to-science for Terrestrial Sensor Networks by Integrating Field Notes, Management, and QA/QC into Data Curation.” This project developed Dendra into a Software as a Service (SaaS) to be integrated into the EarthCube toolset.

New Leaf Solutions, Inc.

New Leaf Solutions, Inc. is a San Francisco Bay Area software consultancy (est. 1998) providing architecture, full-stack development, and deployment support for organizations, large enterprises, and nonprofits like Dendra.

New Leaf Solutions has helped conceptualize and operate Dendra from the ground up, providing years of hard work and expertise on microservice development, clustered infrastructure, and operations best practices adapted to ecological research and supporting services.

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc.

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) advances interdisciplinary water science by providing education and outreach programs like workshops and grants, as well as specialized software and services to share and access data, collaborate online, and compute in the cloud.

CUAHSI developed the original Hydrologic Information System (HIS) and Observations Data Model which was the inspiration for the Berkeley Sensor Database (precursor to Dendra). CUAHSI has collaborated with Dendra Science & New Leaf Solutions on HIS related work.

The Nature Conservancy

Dangermond Preserve & Santa Cruz Island

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) not only purchases lands for preservation, it also pioneers land management and ecosystem research within them. TNC has two historic preserves near Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Cruz Island and Dangermond Preserve. TNC has been experimenting with cutting edge IoT monitoring and management equipment on these preserves, leveraging Dendra for data integration. Please see our article on IoT Experimentation to learn more.

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation

California Heartbeat Initiative (CHI)

The California Heartbeat Initiative (CHI) deployed repeat drone surveys and on-the-ground sensor stations, and it facilitated solution-focused research, which was aimed at improving environmental water forecasting and management for the state of California and projecting economic health and wildland impacts due to climate change. Development of Dendra as a system was a key part of the ground sensor aspect of this project.

UC Nature (formerly UC Natural Reserve System)

UC Nature’s Climate Monitoring Network has 38 standardized research grade weather stations with soil moisture sited on its reserve lands as part of its mission to provide resources for place-based teaching and research. It adopted the Berkeley Sensor Database in 2010 for its weather stations, and in 2016, UC Nature started contributing funding for the next generation replacement, Dendra, and has contributed since.

Eel River Critical Zone Observatory

The critical zone is the area starting from unweathered bedrock underground, up through fractured rock, to soil, to vegetation, to the air just above the tops of trees. It is also known as where most terrestrial life lives.

Eel River Critical Zone Observatory (ERCZO) looks inside hillslopes to understand variations in atmospheric moisture, water chemistry, and river flows. Intensive automated monitoring has enabled this inquiry. ERCZO is the founder of the Berkeley Sensor Database and a key contributor to Dendra.

Please see our article on Novel Instrumentation to learn more about their research with Dendra.