I'm Cathryn Poff β an Oregonian with mixed roots, from German loggers in Oregon to Nordic homesteaders in the Midwest. I grew up spending all my time outdoors β in my family's hazelnut orchards and the wild forests and meadows of Oregon's Chehalem mountains. My earliest childhood was spent in Hawaii, where the foundational concept of Hawaiian life β mΔlama Κ»Δina, caring for the land β became deeply rooted in my soul. I spent my college and grad school years on the East Coast and in Europe before Oregon pulled me back home.
Armed with the expertise from a Master's degree in natural resource management from Yale School of the Environment, I've spent my career translating complex science into action β as a broadcast journalist, a Peace Corps development and sustainability specialist in West Africa, a federal science policy fellow working on critical habitat plans for endangered salmon, and a senior communications officer for international climate finance at the World Bank/UN Adaptation Fund. Along the way, I've built communications functions from scratch and spent a career finding the human stories in complicated situations.
"The pandemic β and watching AI absorb so much of the work I'd built a career around β reordered my priorities. I'm now focused on putting AI to work for good β in service to our real and breathtaking natural world."
SmartScape is what happened when my deep love for our natural world met the new tech tools of the 2020s. SmartScape is largely AI-powered, and I don't take the energy and water that AI's data centers use lightly β a single Greenprint uses roughly the energy and water of a couple Google searches, small on its own, but that's a real, valid concern at data-center scale. That's part of why it's not automated for its own sake. Real, expert human knowledge is hard-coded into the software itself, and precisely directs every step: every plant match, every layout, every nursery and landscaper connection.
I'm building this solo, the way founders increasingly do now β leaner, faster, and closer to the problem β with input along the way from my brilliant advisory crew of plant ecologists, software engineers, and a growing community of native-plant experts who care as much about getting this right as I do.
I also created SmartBash, an eco-friendly party supply company β because caring for our planet shouldn't stop at the yard. It belongs in all of our everyday choices.
Childhood
Dirt Under the Nails
Picking strawberries in Tigard's fields, hauling in the family hazelnut harvest on Sherwood's Chehalem mountain, weeks of backbreaking work replanting fir forests in the Coast Range β Oregon's land raised me to deeply respect and love it.
Peace Corps
Niger, West Africa
Two years working in community development and sustainability on the edge of the Sahara Desert.
KRON-TV, NBC, PBS, NPR
Broadcast journalism
Years spent finding the human stories β and the why behind them β in complex, fast-moving situations.
NOAA
Presidential Management Fellowship
Worked on federal science policy issues at NOAA, including critical habitat for endangered salmon.
World Bank/UN
Adaptation Fund
Built a communications function from scratch for international climate finance, making complex funding decisions understandable to the people they affected β and this also helped drive a 75% increase in funding.
Today
SmartScape
Nativescaping isn't optional anymore β it's critical for providing the habitat and nourishment our collapsing bird and insect populations need, for thriving in the wildfire-prone West, and for reducing the huge amount of irrigation water our yards drink up. I built the Greenprint Generator to make nativescaping easier.
