Levee Digital Twin Platform Launches for California's Yuba River Corridor Featured

Researchers at UC Berkeley, funded by Yuba Water, have unveiled the Levee Digital Twin Platform — a comprehensive, interactive monitoring system built for levee inspection and condition assessment along the Yuba River Corridor in Sacramento Valley, California. The platform, accessible at leveedigitaltwin.org, was developed using the EZ Digital Twins service platform, which provided the geospatial data integration, visualization, and sharing infrastructure that made the project possible.

The initiative represents a significant step forward in how engineers and asset managers approach the monitoring of flood defense infrastructure. Rather than relying on periodic visual inspections and manual data collection, the Levee Digital Twin Platform unifies multiple high-resolution data streams into a single, continuously updated digital representation of the levee system.

The platform integrates multiple distinct data layers collected across two field seasons between 2024 and 2025, covering two sites — RD784 and Dry Creek — along the Yuba River Corridor. Data layers include aerial multispectral imagery, thermal infrared, LiDAR and photogrammetry point clouds, subsurface electromagnetic surveys, boreholes and piezometer reading, embedded cameras and geotagged field photographs. Users can toggle between 2D and 3D viewports, fly to point cloud models, run measurements, watch cameras and sensors readings and export mapping layouts — all from within a browser-based interface.

Levees are among the most consequential and underleveraged assets in public infrastructure. The levee systems of California's Sacramento Valley protect hundreds of thousands of residents and billions of dollars in agricultural and urban property, yet monitoring has historically lagged behind other critical infrastructure categories. Digital twin technology — combining real-time sensor data, remote sensing, and predictive analytics — offers a path toward earlier detection of seepage anomalies, settlement, and structural degradation, long before conditions become critical.

The Levee Digital Twin Platform demonstrates that this approach is not only technically viable but also practically deployable using existing managed platforms.

The Levee Digital Twin Platform was built on EZ Digital Twins, a managed geospatial digital twin service designed for infrastructure professionals. EZ Digital Twins handled the integration of multi-modal data — sensors, LiDAR, imagery, and analytics — into a single, interactive environment, removing the need for the research team to build and maintain bespoke backend infrastructure.

More information on the EZ Digital Twins platform is available at ezdigitaltwins.com.