In the dense jungles of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, an invisible laser beam slices through the canopy, bouncing off the earth and back to the airplane it came from…
LiDAR technology has been used in archeological research as early as 2003, but perhaps its biggest and most public discoveries came in 2018 when National Geographic shared the stunning discovery of thousands of Maya ruins hidden beneath the Yucatán jungle.
But for the indigenous communities living above those ruins, the real challenge isn’t uncovering the past—it’s navigating the future. Climate change and the erosion of traditional farming knowledge threaten food security across the region.
Maia Dedrick, now an assistant professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University, realized as a post-doctoral fellow that this technology could be used to help modern-day farmers and secured a National Geographic Society grant to acquire LiDAR data for this purpose.
Not only can LiDAR detect archaeological ruins under layers of plant matter, but it can also estimate the area’s biomass and biodiversity based on the heights and densities of vegetation relative to the ground surface, she explains.
For example, if an area has a high canopy of trees, that tells a farmer the ground has been left uncultivated for a longer time and would likely have a productive season once cleared. However, some canopies of particular heights can have guano palms, which are used for roof thatching and should be preserved.
Being able to see this data at a glance would help local Yucatecan farming committees make more informed and efficient decisions about land use and crop management.
“Agriculture is a huge part of this community—it’s their heritage and their economic grounding,” Dedrick adds. “My hope from the start was to share the information with the community so that they could leverage this technology to preserve their way of life.”
She brought her idea to the Santa Clara’s Frugal Innovation Hub (FIH), a center within the School of Engineering dedicated to connecting engineering students and faculty with humanitarian projects.
There, she was introduced to Angela Musurlian, an associate teaching professor in computer science and engineering, and the two began recruiting engineering students to develop a mobile app that would integrate LiDAR technology for agricultural applications.
Thus, MayanRoots was born.
Now in its second year of development, the MayanRoots app blends spatial mapping with local indigenous farming knowledge to help modern-day Mayan farmers manage land more sustainably in the face of climate change—while also preserving their cultural heritage.
Centering local wisdom
From the start, the project was guided through collaboration with Professor Adolfo Iván Batún Alpuche, a Maya archaeologist at the Universidad de Oriente who acted as the team’s “boots on the ground” within Tahcabo, a small, indigenous farming town in Yucatán.
His professional expertise, community contacts, and personal knowledge of the region helped the Santa Clara team better understand what the community would actually need from an agricultural app.
Based on Batún’s notes, MayanRoots was, first and foremost, designed for accessibility and function: audio-read options for low-literacy users, lightweight storage to work on older Android phones, and even offline functionality. The team also ensured that the app’s content could be translated into Spanish and the local Yucatec Mayan language.
At a time when fewer Yucatecan youths are speaking Mayan or staying in their home communities to farm, these small design decisions represented something much more powerful.
“As we continued, the application became more holistic,” Dedrick notes. “Beyond my initial, pragmatic goal of sharing LiDAR imagery, MayanRoots addressed a bigger problem: a lack of continuity in agricultural knowledge. There’s a real desire within these communities to preserve indigenous language and knowledge, and to find ways to get young people interested in it.”
Key to this goal was integrating in-app education around the milpa system—a traditional Maya method of polycultural agriculture that goes far beyond the “three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash by integrating yuca, fruit trees, amaranth, and other root crops and edible weedy plants.
By embedding this traditional knowledge directly into the app, younger users can explore descriptions of local crops, their relationships to each other, and agricultural calendars based on lunar phases.
A tool for the future, rooted in the past
As of now, the first iteration of the MayanRoots app uses Google API-based mapping but, in the coming year, Musurlian hopes to integrate those LiDAR maps as a layer and add more interactive features, like the ability to report pests and crop diseases.
This kind of user feedback is especially critical as climate change brings new challenges, like a lack of water during growing seasons. The team hopes to address this by integrating water modeling features from another FIH project Musurlian worked on called NicaAgua, as well as potentially utilizing local, non-Western systems of climate prediction.
For example, Dedrick notes that, in Yucatán, people often study the behavior of leafcutter ants, toads, snakes, and sparrow hawks to determine the likelihood of rain, believing animals are “more accurate than the weather channel, because they’re more specific to the rainfall patterns in these small communities.”
“I think connecting indigenous knowledge systems like this and scientific knowledge will only improve how we understand the actual impacts of climate change in farmers’ lives,” Musurlian adds.
With Musurlian’s next team of engineering students ready to take the baton, this year, the MayanRoots project will be bolstered by a second team of students from environmental studies and sciences to deepen the app’s climate predictive capabilities. From there, Dedrick plans to run beta app tests with focus groups in Tahcabo, where what began with lasers in the jungle has become an encouraging example of how academia and communities can co-create technology together.