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Map of the northern Bay Area showing the overlap of nature's values and benefits.

Bay Area Greenprint application

The Nature Conservancy in California

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GreenInfo team: Dan Rademacher, Gregor Allensworth, Jayita Bhojwani, Tim Sinnott

Project years: 2016-2022

Tags: Conservation Economic Development Environment GIS Services Recreation Social Justice/Equity Strategy Web Mapping Website Design

Overview

What challenges is this project trying to solve?

  • The value of environmental systems are often missed in public decision making regarding land uses. It becomes difficult for decision makers to account for them when information and data are dispersed across the web.
  • The Bay Area is abundant with environmental and ecological diversity meaning that decisions created to match one geographic area may not apply to another.

What were the client’s objectives?

  • Explore options and strategies with stronger consideration for conservation in land use decisions across the Bay Area
  • Create interactive tools for communicating scientific data to both our regional partners and the general public in an accessible format

Results

  • Access to a series of tools that support decision-making with an environmental lens through data visualization, strategic analysis, and impact reporting.
  • The ability for users to generate reports based across a variety of environmental factors within a user-defined area.
Image of Bay Area Greenprint's 'Analyze and Report' tool

The Work

Design Approach

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has long championed the importance of these “nature’s benefits” or ecosystem services and, with other leading Bay Area nonprofits, has worked with GreenInfo to design, build, maintain, and expand a major web application to turn science and policy thinking into an accessible tool for public agencies, advocates, and anyone interested in the environmental implications of public decisions.

GreenInfo began work on the Greenprint project when TNC California, TOGETHER Bay Area, Greenbelt Alliance, and the American Farmland Trust California office asked us to prepare a review of “toolkit” options and strategies for their goal of stronger consideration of conservation in land use decisions in the Bay Area. This reconnaissance transitioned into multi-year collaboration to develop the tool and adapt the work to wider audiences and applications.

 

Translating the Data

TNC and the other project partners have taken on the considerable science assessment and analysis, bringing sophisticated and complex techniques to identifying and prioritizing ecosystem services for the web tool. Advisory groups on science and methods and on policy were convened and reviews of approach conducted. Over 100 data sets were assessed for use in the tool, and many options considered for the most accurate way to convey measures of ecosystem values.
A key part of the system architecture is that the majority of the data is contained in a 30-meter “fishnet” grid (about 20 million points),  querying across dozens or hundred of overlapping polygon datasets.

 

Acknowledgements

Bay Area Greenprint was Supported by the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, with graphic design support from our frequent design partner, Ison Design.
The data was all processed using Esri desktop GIS software, and prototype cartography was developed for all layers in ArcMap as well. The web application is built in Django on top of a Postgres/PostGIS database and uses Mapserver for cartographic display.