Blue Duck Discovery Lab

Ground truth,at landscape scale.

Research · Technology · Conservation

A nonprofit environmental field laboratory. We fly, scan, and survey working land and wetlands, then turn what the instruments record into decisions conservation partners can act on.

Partner with the labSee what we measure

501(c)(3) nonprofit

McKinney, Texas

Central Flyway

Lithic Earth

Discovery Alliance

Research posture

Better decisions begin with better data.

No single sensor tells the whole story. We combine environmental science, geophysics, and airborne survey so the patterns that only appear across datasets have somewhere to show up.

Every method we publish has been run in real landscapes, under real conditions, against a real conservation question — not on a demo plot.

Discovery Alliance

Built through collaboration. Proven in the field.

Three organizations, one shared field program. Each brings a discipline the others depend on.

Ceto Interactive

Environmental Intelligence

Environmental consulting, GIS, and field technology — turning site data into assessments that hold up under review.

Lithic Earth

Geospatial + Geophysics

Multi-source geospatial intelligence, LiDAR, archaeology, geology, GPR, and subsurface investigation.

Astarte Works

Technology + Innovation

Systems integration, instrumentation, and the research tooling that keeps field data usable after the field.

Core capabilities

From observation to understanding.

Four practices that overlap on most sites. We rarely run one without the others.

Environmental Intelligence

Field observations, spatial data, and remote sensing, reconciled into one picture of a site.

GISSpatial analysisDecision support

Aerial Systems

Uncrewed aircraft and calibrated sensors documenting terrain, canopy, and water at centimeter scale.

UASLiDARThermalMultispectral

Surface + Subsurface

Reading what sits below ground without digging it up — utilities, features, stratigraphy, voids.

GPRGeophysicsArchaeology

Long-Term Monitoring

Repeatable survey methods that measure change in water, habitat, and wildlife across seasons.

WaterWetlandsWildlifeSensors

Instruments

One landscape, read three ways.

Airborne

Collected from above the canopy

  • UAS
  • LiDAR
  • Thermal
  • Multispectral

Subsurface

Collected without excavation

  • GPR
  • Magnetometry
  • Environmental sensors

Position + Analysis

Where it is, and what it means

  • GNSS
  • Photogrammetry
  • 3D modeling
  • GIS
  • Remote sensing

How a project runs

Research designed for real-world deployment.

  1. 01

    Investigate

    Define the environmental question, then assemble only the instruments that can answer it.

  2. 02

    Deploy

    Run the survey in real conditions — heat, mud, wind, and access limits included.

  3. 03

    Translate

    Reduce the data to findings a partner can act on, with the uncertainty stated plainly.

Collaborate

Bring the next environmental question into the field.

We work with conservation organizations, agencies, landowners, researchers, and technology developers. Tell us the site and the question.

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