Building an environmental intelligence platform on AWS with open data

This article describes a serverless environmental intelligence platform built on AWS that enables nontechnical users to ask plain-language questions about environmental scenarios and receive answers synthesized from multiple open data sources.

• Amazon Bedrock Agents understand intent, select appropriate tools, and chain multistep environmental analysis automatically
• AgentCore Gateway enforces guardrails to block out-of-scope queries and injects data source attribution into every answer
• Lambda tools expose environmental data domains (water quality, land use, biodiversity, satellite imagery) as Model Context Protocol tools
• TESSERA geospatial foundation model enables change detection and similarity search on satellite imagery without requiring specialist expertise
• Registry of Open Data on AWS (RODA) MCP Server allows the platform to discover and integrate new datasets on demand
• Response interceptor provides confidence levels and source attribution (government data, foundation models, prototype outputs) for regulatory traceability
• Platform automatically chains multiple tools based on questions; no preconfigured workflows required

The pattern of one tool per data domain, centralized governance at the gateway, and discovery-based dataset integration enables rapid deployment across environmental domains and removes the GIS specialist bottleneck for environmental decision-making.