capybara geek center

About Capybara Center

An independent, volunteer-led, open-science project for climate resilience.

We empower people and communities through code. Capybara turns open Earth-observation data into early warnings, decision tools, and public reports for the places that need them most.

What we are

Capybara Center is an independent climate analytics project. We build early-warning models for floods, wildfires, and heatwaves on Google Earth Engine; we publish situation reports using a peer-reviewed analytic framework; we release every model as open code; and we support volunteers running these tools for the regions they care about. We are not a company, an NGO, or a research institute. We are a personal-project-turned-volunteer-collective with a small core team and a growing global network of contributors.

We are independent of any government, commercial sponsor, or political party. We complement, but never replace, the official warnings issued by national meteorological services. We work in the gap between an EU-wide deployment posture and a specific neighborhood — the per-pixel scale where decisions about specific places, specific infrastructure, and specific evacuation routes get made.

Why this work matters

There is a closing window of opportunity to bridge the gap between the climate crisis and our capacity to respond to it. The WMO documents a five-fold increase in weather-related disasters since 1970 and a six-fold mortality differential between high-income and low-income countries. The Global Commission on Adaptation finds that each dollar spent on early-warning preparedness saves at least nine in downstream losses. The technology to deliver the warnings exists; the analyses to translate them for specific places largely does not. That is the gap Capybara works in.

We focus on the last quarter mile of climate knowledge translation — the distance between a global forecast and an actionable decision for a specific neighborhood, plantation, hospital, river basin, or municipal civil-protection office. Big institutions cannot afford to write a situation report for every region; we can, because we are open and because we ask volunteers to write the ones they know best.

How we work

Open code Every model is open-source on GitHub under MIT licence. Wildfire, flood, heatwave — anyone can read it, fork it, run it, or extend it for their region.

JANUS analytic framework Every claim traces to a dataset or a verifiable source. Every report gets an adversarial pass. External triangulation gets equal billing with model output. AI assistance is disclosed transparently. Feged 2025.

Volunteer-led A small core team plus a growing network of volunteers running country-scale analyses and writing situation reports for the places they know best. Editorial review is collaborative.

Behind every Capybara situation report is a chain of design choices that we make publicly visible — what data went in, what assumptions held, what alternative explanations were considered, what we still don't know. That chain is the JANUS framework. We adopted it because climate-risk communication has a long history of confident outputs that turn out to be brittle. Traceable claims are slower to produce but harder to argue with.

The team

Alejandro Feged-Rivadeneira, Ph.D. Founder · Lead analyst Alejandro is a researcher and connector working at the intersection of climate change, data analytics, human ecology, and knowledge translation. He has led research on malaria heterogeneity in the Amazon, the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban epidemics, and indigenous data governance with the Gaia Amazonas Foundation. He founded Capybara in 2024 to bring science, technology, and communities into a single workflow for climate resilience.

Emma Lozano, BSc Biology GIS researcher Emma is an interdisciplinary scientist and territorial analyst with expertise in biodiversity conservation, spatial data analytics, and environmental governance. She specializes in the bridge between scientific rigor and community action — translating model outputs into formats that local authorities and indigenous-territory leaders can use.

And a growing volunteer network. Capybara is structured so that a volunteer with a Google account, an internet connection, and a region they care about can run the models, write a JANUS-format situation report, and publish it. The core team supports onboarding, editorial review, and stakeholder relationships. The work scales when more people join. Volunteers are credited on every report they contribute to.

A short history

2024	Capybara Center founded by Alejandro Feged-Rivadeneira. Initial focus on building climate early-warning prototypes on Google Earth Engine for Colombian basins, drawing on a decade of prior work on malaria, urban analytics, and indigenous data governance.
2025	Publication of the JANUS framework for LLM-assisted qualitative analysis and writing (Feged 2025). First situation reports issued for Colombian floods and wildfires. Emma Lozano joins as GIS researcher.
2026	Pivot to volunteer collective with a public open-source repository. WeatherNext 2 ensemble integrated as a forecast horizon. Situation reports for Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Western Europe, and beyond. Onboarding of the first regional volunteer cohort.
Next	Scheduled daily runs for priority countries. A formal partner programme. Expansion of the volunteer network beyond Latin America and Europe.

What we don't do

Capybara is a mission-driven project with bright lines. We try to be transparent about all of them.

Partisan political claims	Climate risk is real and inescapably political. Our reports describe risk, not parties, candidates, or governments.
Paid placement or sponsored content	If a published analysis would be different because someone paid for it, we do not publish it. Consulting relationships that touch the same region or topic get disclosed.
Personally identifiable information	Population in our exposure layers is statistical. We never name individuals or households. We never publish household-level coordinates.
Anonymous publication	Every situation report carries the analyst's name. Reviewers' names are recorded in the JANUS review record.
Half-checked claims to meet a deadline	Better late than wrong. If the JANUS quality gates are not satisfied, the post waits.

Get in touch

Volunteers, partners, journalists, indigenous-territory authorities, civil-protection coordinators — all welcome.

Become a volunteer	Read the FAQ section on volunteering, then send a short message with your background and a region you would like to cover.
Partner or commission a custom analysis	Send the country / region, the hazard, and the timeline. We respond with a short two-pager describing scope and approach.
Press inquiries	Happy to provide context for stories that cite Capybara situation reports. Please attribute as "Capybara Center" and link to the underlying report.
Corrections or disputes	If a report misrepresents your region, your organization, or the data, please tell us. Corrections are public and credited.

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Capybara Center · Founded 2024 · capybaracenter.blogspot.com · Open code on GitHub (MIT) · JANUS framework: DOI 10.21203/rs.3.rs-7580516/v1