Software

Environmental monitoring software is built for two kinds of organizations: the very large and the very well funded. Everyone else gets a spreadsheet.

DANalytics builds for everyone else — classrooms, watershed coalitions, conservation districts, tribal environmental programs, and municipal utilities. The same quality control, the same audit trails, the same submission-ready exports that a state agency expects, at a scale a three-person program can operate and a grant can pay for.

The rigor lives in the software architecture, not in the user’s expertise level.

One Engine, Many Configurations

Every DANalytics product runs on the same core: a shared data schema, a shared parameter dictionary, and a shared set of connectors to public agency data.

That is not an implementation detail — it is the reason a small program can afford this. A fix to the quality control engine improves every deployment at once. A new data connector becomes available to every client the day it ships. A classroom in Carson City and a tribal water program four states away run the same tested code, configured differently.

Configuration happens in a plain-text deployment file: your sites, your parameters, your regulatory criteria, your sampling schedule. No custom software build. No forked codebase to maintain. No version drift.

The Module Family

Modules are named for riparian trees native to the watersheds we serve. Each handles a distinct kind of environmental data, and all of them share the same core.

We publish this table honestly because you are going to ask, and because a vendor who overstates what exists is a vendor who will overstate what your data shows.

CEDAR — Continuous Water Quality

CEDAR is the flagship and the framework the rest is built on. It takes raw sensor records from deployment through to a defensible, submission-ready dataset.

Import — Sonde and logger files land in a single standardized format. HOBO and other common exports are parsed natively, with instrument metadata, deployment events, and time zones preserved rather than flattened.

Context — Your record is automatically placed alongside public data for the same watershed and time window: USGS streamflow, SNOTEL snowpack, NASA POWER climate, Water Quality Portal samples, and EPA ATTAINS assessment status. Context arrives with the data instead of being assembled by hand afterward.

Corrections before QC — Fouling and drift corrections are applied before automated quality control runs. This ordering is deliberate, and it is not what most tools do. Run QC first and your algorithms spend their time flagging systematic sensor drift; correct first and they flag what they were built to find — the genuine anomalies.

Quality control — Rate-of-change, flatline, range, gap, and outlier checks, each configurable per parameter and per site. Every flag records what triggered it, what threshold applied, and who reviewed it.

Analysis — Interactive time series, parameter comparison, and evaluation against the water quality criteria that actually apply to your waterbody, including single-sample versus geometric-mean distinctions where they matter.

Export — Clean data in WQX-compatible format for Water Quality Portal submission, plus parameterized reports with every data source and method cited.

QAPP support — Quality Assurance Project Plan elements are generated from the same configuration that drives the software, so your documented procedures and your actual procedures cannot drift apart.

Project FLOW — The Classroom Edition

The same engine, configured for students, with a narrative learning layer and classroom management built in. Students run real sensor data through the real professional workflow.

Project FLOW is chapter-based: a school, district, youth organization, or agency operates a local chapter monitoring its own waterbody, and DANalytics provides the platform, onboarding, data tools, and technical support behind it. A chapter can start as one classroom with one site and grow into a school program, a multi-school watershed network, or a community hub.

One difference from CEDAR matters and we state it plainly. Project FLOW supports educational, community science, outreach, planning, and exploratory monitoring. It does not turn educational data into regulatory data. Where a chapter’s data will be used for regulatory decisions, formal research, or compliance reporting, the chapter establishes protocols, calibration, and review with the appropriate agency or scientific partner. The platform records the source, date, method, units, equipment, and review status of every dataset so that anyone using it understands how far it can be taken.

Project FLOW has its own page — read about it here.

The Teaching Layer

Project FLOW ships with its lessons already inside it. Twenty-four context-triggered teaching cards surface when the data does something worth explaining — a temperature exceedance, a snowmelt cascade, a dissolved oxygen anomaly — with the per-parameter science grounded in EPA educational materials.

That layer is built by a scientist and a teacher who are married to each other. The rigor comes from Daniel Riddle, a working environmental scientist; the craft of reaching a twelve-year-old comes from Amy Riddle, a credentialed science educator and the Project FLOW Chapter Lead at Eagle Valley Middle School. Neither role pretends to be the other, and the distance between them is a dinner table rather than a consulting contract. It is included with a chapter, and a school does not have to build it.

Your teachers make it better. The cards, forms, thresholds, and dashboards get adjusted when a classroom reports that something does not work — which is a standing part of annual service, not a change order. Because every deployment runs the same engine, a fix prompted by one classroom reaches every chapter at once.

We do not write your curriculum. Lesson plans, teacher guides, assessments, and standards crosswalks are authored by your educators and owned by them.

What Makes This Different

Built by someone who collected the data. DANalytics is run by an environmental scientist with more than a decade of field and water quality work behind it, including years as a hydrologic technician. The software knows what a fouled sensor looks like because the person who wrote it has cleaned them.

Designed for the regulatory reality. Criteria evaluation, WQX export, QAPP documentation, and audit trails are not add-ons. They are the reason the software exists.

Honest about uncertainty. Every output states what the data supports and, where it matters, what it does not. Sampling design limitations travel with the results instead of being quietly dropped.

Your data stays yours. You own it, and you get a complete export any time you ask — including on the day you leave.

No investors, no runway. This platform was built on time rather than funding — one $5,000 equipment grant is the entire outside investment behind it. That means pricing reflects what the work costs instead of what a runway demands, and it means nobody is pressuring us to overstate what ships. It also means your data is in open formats and exportable on demand, so your program never depends on this company continuing to exist. The longer version →

Editions and Pricing

Two lines, because that is how budgets and grants are actually structured: a one-time setup, and a recurring service that keeps the program alive after year one.

CEDAR Professional

For tribal environmental programs, watershed coalitions, conservation districts, and utilities.

Project FLOW

For schools and educational monitoring programs. Structured to fit a single grant budget line.

A school chapter is funded differently than an agency program. Grants arrive once, cover a school year, and are written months before the work starts. So a Project FLOW chapter is a single number in year one: setup and the first full year of hosting, support, and data service are one line item. Annual service begins in year two, when the program has a year of its own data to argue with.

A chapter license covers the whole school — every teacher, every class period, every student on the roster. We do not price by seat, and we do not count students.

Add-Ons

What Setup Includes

• A configured platform. Your sites, parameters, units, sampling schedule, and applicable water quality criteria, deployed and live. Complete when your program lead logs in and sees their own data.
• Data protocol package. Print-ready field forms and a matching in-app data entry pathway for your parameters. Complete when forms are delivered and entry is live.
• Onboarding and training. One live session for your staff covering data entry, quality control review, analysis, and export, with a written quick-reference guide. Complete when the session is delivered and the guide is in hand.

What Annual Service Includes

• Hosting and availability of your deployment
• Data management and quality control support
• Automatic integration of public streamflow, climate, and regulatory context
• One annual data report and export in agency-compatible format
• Email support, configuration adjustments, and platform maintenance — so year two does not start from zero
• Ongoing configuration changes when your program says it needs them. Parameters, forms, thresholds, dashboards, user roles, and — for Project FLOW chapters — which teaching cards surface and when. Telling us something does not work is how the software gets fixed, and the fix reaches every deployment.

What Is Not Included

Field equipment purchase, on-site instrument calibration, and sample collection stay with your program. So does regulatory certification of data — we build the record and the audit trail; certifying it is your agency’s call.

Classroom curriculum — lesson plans, teacher guides, assessments, and standards crosswalks — is authored by your educators and owned by them. The bounded piece we do is the software and the teaching layer inside it: we build and maintain the in-app cards, and we adjust them when your teachers tell us what is not working. We do not write your curriculum, and we do not claim ownership of what your educators create.

Anything here can be added by written agreement.

We list this because scope with edges protects both of us.

Student Data and Privacy

Project FLOW is deployed in public schools, so the data rules have to be stricter than the ones an agency deployment needs.

We do not need student names. A chapter deployment identifies student work by class period, team, or a chapter-assigned identifier. Nothing in the data schema requires a full name, a student ID, a date of birth, an email address, or any other directly identifying information, and we recommend against collecting them.

The data belongs to the school. Environmental measurements, quality control decisions, field notes, and photographs collected by a chapter are the district’s records. We do not sell them, license them, advertise against them, or use them to train anything.

Public means deliberately public. A chapter’s watershed data becomes publicly visible only where the chapter chooses to publish it — a Confluence page, an interpretive sign, a report card sent home. Everything else stays inside the deployment.

You can leave with everything. A complete export in open formats is available any time you ask, including on the day you stop being a customer.

Districts with a formal student data privacy agreement process: send us yours and we will sign it.

Start a Conversation

Every program is different, and the fastest way to find out whether this fits is to describe what you are monitoring and what you are currently doing with the data.

daniel@danalyticsenv.com

Built on Open Data

WQP · USGS · NOAA · NASA POWER · ATTAINS · SNOTEL