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He Sapa Makiyuta EA/EIS Study

Storyboard for the wildcard showcase booth

Visual 1. Black Hills Map and Active Mining Claims. (Black Hills Clean Water Alliance & Mato Ohitika Analytics LLC)

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One sentence on impact: Tribal groups want to collaborate to create pragmatic tools to better understand information to protect their land, resources, and sovereignty.

Draft project brief (PDF/A) · View shared code · Explore data

About this site: This is a public, in-progress record of Innovation Summit Team 20. Update anything here in your browser: open a file → pencil icon → Commit changes. The page is structured so we can talk through the project in under two minutes.

Day 1 — Define & Explore

Our product 📣

  • A dashboard/interactive search tool to more easily comb through 2,400 Environmental Impact Statement/Assessment documents from the US Forest Service, US NRC, BLM, etc.

Our question(s) 📣

  • How can we create a tool for non-technical tribal decision-makers to access and understand meaningful information about extractive activities in the HeSapa through EIAs?

Hypotheses / intentions

Why this matters (the “upshot”) 📣

  • HeSapa is sacred land to tribes and exposed to extractives activities
  • The information will be accessible to non-technical audiences
  • Supports corporate accountability & transparency; environmental justice; and treaty rights around extractive activities in the HeSapa

Inspirations (papers, datasets, tools)

Field notes / visuals

Sticky-note clustering during kickoff

Day 2 — Data & Methods

Focus: tribal engagement to identify key indicators of concern, human-review of a typical EIS, metadata capture, intial steps of PDF extraction.

Data sources we’re exploring 📣

  • Public documents (PDFs) such as Environmental Impact Statements and Assessments from agencies such as Forest Service, EPA, US NRC, BLM.

First look at 600+ pages of a typical EIS Raw photo location: explore_data_plot.png Snapshot: EIS for the Dewey-Burdock Project for In-Site Leach Uranium Milling Facilities.

Atlas cards for high-priority ideas

Visual 2. Potential chemicals and their risk from Dewey Burdock Project.

Methods / technologies we’re testing 📣

  1. Engagement: Engaged with the tribal members to identify key indicators of concern and desired product output.
  2. Centralize and Structure the Data:
  3. PDF Extraction: Use Python/R to extract relevant test from PDFs.
  4. Metadata capture: For each EIS/EA document determine the most relevant information to capture:
    • Document title
    • Agency names
    • Company name(s)
    • Geographical project location/coordinates
    • Type of extractive activity (e.g., mining, forestry)
    • Byproducts from extractive activities (e.g., contaminants or residues)
    • Key environmental impact categories
    • Spreadsheet/Database: Store this data in a structured format (CSV) so it can be filtered and searched.
  5. Automate Key Information Extraction:
  6. Create training set for any LLM models.
  7. Keyword Tagging: Use models to flag mentions of relevant fields.
  8. Build a Long-Term Knowledge Sharing Base
  9. Build a dashboard that can tribal leaders can use for more evidence-based decision-making.
  10. Overlay project sites (pending necessary geograhpical coordinate data) to visualize where activities intersect with culturally and ecologically sensitive areas.

Challenges identified

  • Missing information: Certain projects were waived from creating EIS/EA for categorical exclusion.
  • If any PDFs are not machine-readable, integrate OCR.
  • Writing a generalized code that can effectively parse through PDFs of various formats to capture necessary data.
  • Does the language used in the metadata schema reflect tribal community values?

Final Share Out — Insights & Sharing

Visuals that tell the story 📣

He Sapa Wild_Plant life Collage

He Sapa Relatives: - 🌎 Row 1 L-R: Psipiza (Prairie Dog), Ojinjintka Hu (Prairie Rose), Tatoka (Antelope) - 🌎 Row 2 L-R: Icahpe Hu (Purple Coneflower), Wahpe Hinsma (Mullein) - 🌎 Row 3 L-R: Canpa (Chokecherry Bush), Unkcekhiha (Black-billed Magpie), Pejihota (Sage)

Bison

Tatanka (Buffalo)

Findings at a glance 📣

  • Key priority areas for tribes: Impact of extractive activities on historical resources, cultural sites, wildlife (bison), water bodies, soil, air, plant life, and broader ecosystems
  • Test and refine workflow with a handful of human-reviewed EIS/EAs: human review of PDFs compares to machine-generated PDF parse results for accuracy and quality.
  • Deeper Knowledge of the Land: Work with tribal partners to understand the language of the land.

What’s next? 📣

  • Refine the PDF search tools, LLM, etc.
  • Broader group: ESIIL Working Group & CU Boulder Research & Innovation Seed Grant Program
Project brief PDF
Read the brief 		View shared code
View code 		Explore data
Explore data

Team

  • Alicia Swimmer
  • Sylwia Zieba
  • Keiko Nomura

Storage

Code

Documentation

Cite & reuse

If you use these materials, please cite:

He Sapa Makiyuta EA/EIS Study. (2025). He Sapa Makiyuta EA/EIS Study Innovation Summit 2025 Repository. https://github.com/CU-ESIIL/wildcard-topic-innovation-summit-2025__20

License: CC-BY-4.0 unless noted. See dataset licenses on the Data page.

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