CA Futures
Developer
Purpose
Most California entities responsible for land stewardship currently have no effective way of describing and evaluating climate futures, or of incorporating them into decision-making processes.
Steps Forward
CA Futures maps future species distributions and habitat connectivity. It democratizes access to computational power and ecological realism, enabling climate-resilient land conservation decisions.
Timeline
May 2025
September 2025
Role
Developer
Tools
Vue JS
Py4Web
Mercator
Team
Luca De Alfaro
Rudra Chavda
First Steps
May 15, 2025
A team of ten undergraduate students furiously works towards building a web application capable of displaying predicted dispersals of tree and bird species using raster files. The needed tool would model the consequences of conservation decisions. In our first introductory meeting, I could feel the pressure of the requirements, and the look on my colleagues' faces told the same story.
The unfinished Github repository was filled with failures: precomputed raster files refused to load due to frontend compatibility issues, essential packages like “ecoscape_connectivity” were breaking due to severe version conflicts, and there was a lack of organization to the code. We had external dependencies relying on our success, yet we had no clear starting point. There had to be an efficient way to finish problems.
What We Did Next
May 15, 2025
I decided to take the lead and draw from my past experiences, to implement the “Scrum” methodology. I suggested we schedule standups and friendly meetups early in the day to prioritize the project. I had two goals for the outcome of these meetings. One was to synchronize progress and ask, “what do we need to do?” The second was to be able to understand the expertise of my teammates and know how to use it to our advantage.
This focus on deliverable goals changed our dynamic entirely, and as we progressed our attitudes from “near impossible” to “might be able to pull it off” to “done!” all in the span of four weeks. We had more synchronization than silence, and we all took individual tasks of file organization, conflict resolution, documentation, and development. I was honored to present our functioning application to the Biology Department on time.
Exploring Futures
Blue oak dispersal
Exploring Actions
Blue Oak dispersal that can now be modified
remove or add habitat to see the effects on dispersal
Full heatmap of dispersal changes
The Outcome
September 19, 2025
My assumed leadership role taught me to recognize and elevate others’ strengths. Through constant feedback and alignment, we built both momentum and trust in each other. At our every “meetup,” I found new ways to convert the attitudes that stalled progress into belief that our project can succeed.