About

What is sandpiper?

Forecasting how our environment will change into the future requires the scientific community to understand the processes that shape Earth’s surface environments through time. To do this, geoscientists collect images of Earth with satellites, run simulations, and test hypotheses with laboratory experiments. All of these methods improve our understanding of landscape change, but scientists using each of these tools struggle to bring their research together to make new insights.

sandpiper is a framework of interoperable hardware and software tools that enables research products from different teams and approaches to integrate with one another more easily than ever before. Major efforts of the project team include

  1. designing and implementing an affordable open-source hardware-firmware system for data acquisition
  2. forging a community-backed data standard
  3. developing a flexible and interoperable data-analysis software library
  4. establishing a sustainable community of practice.

project_schematic
sandpiper framework. By combining existing mature elements that serve geomorphology (grey boxes) with our planned improvements (colored boxes) and sandpiper integration.

Workshop: Launching sandpiper: how to better collaborate and exchange data across geomorphology

We are organizing a workshop for Spring 2025, April 17th and 18th, in Minneapolis, MN, USA. The goal of this workshop is to determine community priorities and draw a scope for the project.

We have travel and lodging funding available for ~30 participants, and we would love to have you join us. Get more information about the workshop, and apply to be a part of it, here.

Contributing

Interested in joining the effort? We are excited to bring on collaborators, users, developers, scientists, documentation-writers, idea-havers, and anyone else who wants to be a part of sandpiper. Ultimately, we are our community of users. Join us on GitHub by submitting a pull request or opening an issue!

Leadership team