On California’s Central Coast, where the Santa Ynez Mountains meet the Pacific, 24,000 acres of protected land are becoming a living laboratory for the future of conservation science. The Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve, managed by The Nature Conservancy, sits at what Kelly Easterday, director of conservation technology, calls “the elbow of California.” A landscape so complex it resists easy modeling. Yet that’s exactly what the team is attempting: building a digital twin not of a building or city, but of nature itself.
Why This Landscape
The preserve sits within a biodiversity hotspot within a hotspot, home to species found nowhere else. Its location at Point Conception creates a rare crossroads where terrestrial and marine ecosystems collide. Protection extends from 24,000 acres on land to a 22,000-acre marine protected area offshore. One of only 9% of California’s coastline protected on both land and sea, sheltering species like mountain lions, snowy plovers, and black abalone.
In 2018, the land was protected forever through a $165 million gift – TNC’s largest ever – from Jack and Laura Dangermond, founders of Esri.
“Natural areas, especially pristine and intact areas like the preserve, are so important, and they are disappearing every day,” said Jack Dangermond.
“Laura and I became deeply attached to this land long ago in the 1960s. We felt it was important, and our duty, to conserve a place like this. We believe strongly that being a citizen requires a responsibility to and for our environment. It’s our hope that others will follow suit and protect these precious places while we still can.” It’s a message that resonates well beyond Dangermond’s own philanthropy and a nudge to anyone with the means to do the same.
From Protection to Platform
The story didn’t end with the protection of the land. “We need these landscapes to be places of science, of discovery, of learning,” Easterday says. Ecosystems are dynamic and interconnected, but conservation data is typically siloed by discipline, which makes it difficult to answer even basic questions about what’s changing and why.
That’s where the digital twin comes in: not a 3D model, but a system built on bi-directional data flow and adaptive learning, designed around the protected area and the community that uses it. It enables people to observe, understand, coordinate, and act at a local scale.
The foundation is the Dangermond Geospatial Hub, an open public platform built on Esri’s Hub software and ArcGIS Online, guided by a philosophy of open science and open data. The hub connects over 100 sensors, 40 institutional partners, and over 160 active research projects. On top of it, the team has built purpose-specific tools, including a virtual entrance to the preserve using Living Atlas layers that lets users explore vegetation, wildlife habitats, live weather, and 3D terrain controls.
Case Study: Restoring the Steelhead
The Halama Watershed is nearly the size of Manhattan and fully under conservation ownership. It also showcases the twin’s practical value. The team transformed 41 groundwater wells into live-streaming monitors tracking recharge every 15 minutes, creating what may be the densest live groundwater network of its kind.
That data now supports reintroducing the steelhead, a species extinct from the watershed since the 1990s. By modeling high and low-flow conditions, the team validated viable habitat, leading to the removal of two dams and opening more than 13 miles of habitat.
Much of the early work wasn’t glamorous. “A lot of the work on this was just creating data standards,” explains Sophia Leiker, a spatial data science associate, “and making sure everything that comes to the preserve is well documented.” Every contributor signs a data-sharing agreement, solving a common problem: research data that leaves with the researcher who collected it. Wireless-connected wildlife cameras now deliver images instantly instead of requiring physical SD card retrieval, and well-instrumented sites like this one attract researchers who can’t afford their own equipment.
Making the Data Public
Opening the catalog publicly wasn’t easy. “We were terrified to make it public,” Easterday admits. However, it paid off – researchers can see their data live and build on it, enabling data-driven storytelling around fire, water, and rangeland. The impact extends to education, with dashboards feeding K-12 field trip curricula and UC Santa Barbara’s undergraduate spatial science program. Internally, the same data informs decisions on cattle movement and restoration priorities, with datasets like the oak restoration tracker continuously growing rather than sitting static.
Land managers use the twin to prioritize road repairs, restoration investments, and which of roughly 30 stream barriers to remove first for steelhead habitat. Prescribed fire planning is one of the most developed applications – using suitability analysis to target burns that reduce fuel loads, boost biodiversity, or convert invasive grassland to native habitat, all while navigating California’s dense regulatory requirements around air quality and neighbors like Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The Point Conception Institute exists to scale these practices across TNC’s broader California portfolio, which is roughly 5 million acres. The ambition extends globally: Easterday points to more than 1,200 biological field stations across 120 countries already collecting data that could fuel similar digital twins worldwide.
Philosophy Over Technology
Both researchers frame the digital twin as more than technology. “It’s a philosophy,” Easterday says, “how you develop a community that’s comfortable sharing and exchanging data.” Leiker notes conservation has long borrowed tools from other disciplines, a dynamic now shifting as purpose-built technology emerges. She cautions against new biases, like community science platforms overrepresenting rare species while common species, often the backbone of habitat, go undocumented.
Easterday shares an anecdote capturing the real stakes: a young black bear traveled 15 miles down the coastline last year, tracked by camera traps and social media, eventually reaching UC Santa Barbara’s campus before being found dead on a roadside. “That one story is so common that it shouldn’t be,” she says. A stark reminder of why better-protected wildlife corridors matter.
A Living Laboratory
“We’re a staff of two,” Easterday notes. “You can do a lot with few resources.” As the preserve’s lessons spread through the Point Conception Institute and its open hub, the vision is clear: a world where protected landscapes are continuously studied and adapted, creating digital twins for nature at a global scale.
Sunset at the Dangermond: The sun sets on the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve. © Ian Boyle
Featured Photo: Dangermond Preserve, CA: Coast oak woodlands along a ridge overlooking rolling hills that descend to the Pacific Ocean on the Dangermond Preserve. © Bill Marr/TNC
