Why Topiku Supports Adventure Scientists Through the Changemakers Program
Gregg Treinish founded Adventure Scientists in 2011 from a question he kept returning to: the outdoor enthusiasts already going to remote, difficult environments had exactly the skills that conservation researchers needed. They were already climbing the mountains, paddling the rivers, and reaching the places that data collection requires. What if they collected something useful on the way?
The answer became a 501(c)3 nonprofit based in Bozeman, Montana. Since their founding in 2011, Adventure Scientists has sent tens of thousands of volunteers on missions to collect data from remote, difficult-to-access locations for their conservation partners. Their work has helped discover more than three dozen new species, provided key information to guide climate change decision-making, and helped protect threatened wildlife habitat around the world.
The model is deliberate. Adventure Scientists uses a volunteer-powered, research-grade citizen science model to collect high-quality conservation data from environments that are difficult, expensive, or unsafe for traditional research teams to access. They recruit volunteers with real outdoor skills and train them to collect field data that meets the standards their scientific partners need to publish and act on. A soil sample collected by an Adventure Scientists volunteer on a remote ridge is not a symbolic gesture. It is a data point that a researcher is waiting on.
Their focus areas span forests, biodiversity, freshwater systems, and climate. Past projects have included building what was at the time the world's largest microplastics dataset, tracking illegal timber poaching, monitoring coral reefs across Latin America, and mapping the entire biodiversity of the state of California. Gregg Treinish, Adventure Scientists' Executive Director, has said there is no ecosystem, however urbanised, that cannot benefit from more data.
Photo Credit: Adventure Scientists
What the Changemakers Program is
The Topiku Changemakers Program is how we support non-profit organiations doing conservation work we believe in. The support is practical: we make hats for the people doing the work.
For Adventure Scientists, that means hats for volunteers heading into the field. The connection is direct. Their volunteers spend time in exactly the conditions our hats are built for: outdoors, in variable weather, over extended periods, in places where gear has to hold up. A hat made from upcycled cotton twill and a recycled HDPE brim, constructed by the artisan team at Esduabelas in Desa Rahayu and built to last through years of regular wear, is the right object for someone collecting water quality data on a remote river or soil samples in a mountain forest.
We are not the story here. The data coming back from Adventure Scientists' field missions is.
Our hat mock up for Adventure Scientists
Further reading
Adventure Scientists' full project portfolio, volunteer opportunities, and impact documentation are at adventurescientists.org. Gregg Treinish's work and the organisation's model were profiled by Mongabay in November 2025.
Works Cited
Adventure Scientists. About Us. https://www.adventurescientists.org/about-us.html
Adventure Scientists. History and Model. https://www.adventurescientists.org/history-and-model.html
Mongabay. "Turning outdoor exploration into environmental discovery: Gregg Treinish and the rise of Adventure Scientists." November 2025. https://news.mongabay.com/2025/11/turning-outdoor-exploration-into-environmental-discovery-gregg-treinish-and-the-rise-of-adventure-scientists/
