By Joseph Woo Chan PZ ’27

At the Honnold/Mudd Library Founders Room on April 7, Robert Redford Conservancy (RRC) Fellows Francesca Luna SC ’27 and Luca Davis PZ ’27 led a presentation on the development of SoCal Earth, a website designed for easy access to environmental information regarding Southern California. 

SoCal Earth was first launched in fall 2024 and was developed by students across the Claremont Colleges under the RRC’s Student Fellowship program. The website’s mission is to provide open source information of the same quality as resources such as ArcGIS, a popular online mapping tool, while not requiring an account or being blocked by paywalls. Many Fellows have made contributions to the site, Luna and Davis among them. Its features include a mapping tool, lesson plans for teachers, personal stories, and more.

RRC Director and Pitzer Professor of Environmental Analysis Susan Phillips emphasized how one of the main goals behind the website’s design is that it can be used and navigated by anyone, regardless of their ecological knowledge.

“There’s various things that are extremely user friendly,” Phillips explained. “The whole mantra has always been ‘everyone from a very bright fifth grader to a municipal planner.’ There’s something for everyone on this website.”

Davis continued the presentation by discussing the site’s ‘Make a Map dashboard,’ the online mapping tool. With roughly 200 different layers of data that can be added to a map, users have a lot of freedom with what they can do.

“I think the heart of this experience is being able to explore the data on our website with the atlases and with the web maps, and then start to just play around with the data and ask your own questions. It’s mostly a sandbox for just looking at our region and looking at different patterns.” 

With SoCal Earth still under development, Phillips expressed her hopes for the site to be properly optimized to run on Chromebooks often provided to elementary school age children. 

“One of the challenges I think we’re gonna have is the Chromebook, because they’re really, really slow. My own child was bored in class the other day, and was like ‘Mom, I went on SoCal Earth, but it didn’t work on my Chromebook,’” Phillips recounted. “So we’re going to have to figure that part out because the K-12 audience is a huge part of what we hope to do and we’re not there yet.”

Before concluding the presentation, Luna pointed out the site’s land acknowledgment to the Tongva people, the indigenous inhabitants of the land that Pitzer was constructed on. She highlighted the importance of its inclusion to the collaborative processes between Tongva elders and RRC Fellows in finding information provided on the website. 

“It’s really important for us as students at a private liberal arts college that we’re not just solely citing ourselves all the time,” Luna said, “but also citing [Tongva] elders and including the resources that they are sharing with us.”

With the site up and running, and new features currently in development, SoCal Earth aims for a future where it can be accessed and used by anyone.