Problem
Illegal land clearing, unpermitted mining and concession violations happen continuously and at scale. The raw signals to catch them are public: satellite change alerts fire within days, legal boundaries are mapped, local news surfaces incidents in dozens of languages. No small NGO or newsroom has the staff to correlate all three for every alert, every day.
System
sentinel run ingests alerts, filters and deduplicates them into clusters, spatially joins each cluster against protected-area and concession boundaries, evaluates a legal rule library, retrieves and re-ranks corroborating news, scores violation likelihood, severity and priority, and writes ranked Markdown dossiers with SVG maps. A review dashboard puts a human in the loop. Run it twice and dossiers start noting prior incidents at the same location; run it on a second area of interest and the same pipeline transfers.
Claude is used in tiers: a strong model for high-stakes clusters, a cheap one for routine ones, and a deterministic heuristic when no key is set.
Worth knowing
sentinel auditis a reasoning-faithfulness check. Every citation in a dossier has to resolve to evidence that exists. An investigation tool that invents its sources is worse than no tool.sentinel ablationmeasures alerts-only against no-news against full fusion, so the contribution of each signal is a number, not a claim.- The project is scoped around real data availability and says where the fixtures end and the live feed begins.