u/iris_good — reddlx

▲ 705 r/everythingaboutwater+4 crossposts

Map of every Clean Water Act (NPDES) discharge violation in the US

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)

Link: speakforthetrees.com/facilities

u/iris_good — 1 month ago

▲ 2 r/buildinpublic

Built a tool that writes weekly field reports for any ecosystem in the U.S. — 28 subscribers in

We've been building Speak for the Trees for a few months. The basic idea is that you pick any location, and every couple weeks AI agents pull live public data (USGS water sensors, iNaturalist species sightings, EPA discharge permits, air quality) and write a field report about what's happening ecologically near you.

28 subscribers so far, mostly from those in the Northeast U.S. but scattered across 15+ states.

We're curious if others here find the newsletter at all interesting. Here's a sample.

If you'd like, you can also subscribe here!

reddit.com

u/iris_good — 3 months ago

▲ 3 r/ShowYourApp

Agent-written field reports for local ecosystems using public data, e.g. water/air quality, species sightings, pollution alerts

We've been working on Speak for the Trees for the past few months and wanted to share it here.

What it does: You search for any place, and the app pulls together live public data (USGS water sensors, iNaturalist species observations, EPA discharge permits, NOAA tidal data, air quality). The platform supports subscribing to the newsletter for an ecosystem anywhere in the U.S. Every few weeks, AI agents refresh this data, pick out a few notable observations, complete research for supporting evidence, and generate a field report about what's happening ecologically in that area.

Why we built it: To make public environmental data actually legible. Most of this data is public but completely inaccessible to non-scientists. The goal is to give people a real sense of what's alive and at risk in their local ecosystem.

Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Claude API for synthesis, Resend for email delivery.

If you're interested, try it out here! We'd love to hear any feedback you might have.

u/iris_good — 3 months ago

▲ 106 r/Philanthropy+2 crossposts

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?

speakforthetrees.com

u/iris_good — 3 days ago