Rewilding Intelligence is an equity-driven, community-led data science research collaborative dedicated to promoting the democratic development of socio-technical systems for climate resilience.

To innovate healthy models for climate resilient futures departing from the prevailing logics of social and environmental degradation, we are being asked to imagine and subsequently popularize speculative models for social development. Our approach to scalability is to invent something mycelial in nature; localized, reproducible, but fundamentally communal.

Our flagship project, rewildingCities, involves facilitating community reflection and design sessions centering the creation of a flexible spatial and statistical scaffold to empower citizen scientists of all levels of technical proficiency to imagine and subsequently realize their own critical social-environmental analyses.

rewildingCities is building an open-source platform facilitating localized explorations of socio-technical systems for climate resilience. Our pilot/incubator workshops are part of a broader research study on propagating effective responses to scientific communication on climate research and policy. The infrastructure itself is pedagogical, inviting collaboration from the entire community: children, elders, students, teachers, aspiring professionals, and established experts.

Localized communities of citizen scientists are encouraged to conduct rigorous geospatial analyses exploring speculative realities for positive communal development in response to the interconnected crises of social and environmental chaos—with the aim of modeling these potentialities and identifying priorities for broader interventions in municipal ecology and development.

We accept curated datasets from public portals, Google Earth Engine exports, academic institutions, and other forms of community-collected information. Each participating community initializes and maintains a public manifest that feeds into the analyses performed on their platform plot. The system is designed to help communities understand what their data can and cannot tell them, and to produce honest, contextualized analysis.

We abstract methods employed in computational ecology and sociology to construct a collaborative, democratized research environment to playground sustainable urban development.

One of the most salient issues we can use as a source of abstraction to pilot a prototype of this research engine is the need to mitigate rising temperatures. Urban heatwaves have quickly become the deadliest of natural disasters (Habeeb et al., 2015; He et al., 2022; Shafiei Shiva et al., 2019). For our initial pilot study, we reference a paper evaluating methods for analyzing and understanding the cooling effects of urban parks, published by  Xiao, Y. et al. in Science of the Total Environment (868, 161463) in 2023.

Our pilot/incubator workshops are part of a broader research study on propagating effective responses to scientific communication on climate research and policy.