With so much innovative technology and trailblazing research, the Bay Area has become inundated with environmental land use data. But a dataset is only as good as its accessibility and interpretation. That is why, over two years ago, a coalition of organizations in the Bay Area sought to create a free online tool to harness the region’s spatial data to help practitioners incorporate nature’s values and benefits into their unique land-use decisions. This tool is called the Bay Area Greenprint.
While greenprints have been springing up all over the country to help practitioners and planners make data-driven conservation decisions, BayAreaGreenprint.org builds on local innovation and principles of inclusivity for stewarding our cities and open spaces. It provides consultants, planners, infrastructure and conservation practitioners, as well as community members, a way to efficiently sort through mountains of information. It gives a more complete understanding of the costs and benefits of decisions made around natural and agricultural lands, hazards, urban greening, climate change, and policy and development. The Bay Area Greenprint website presents this data in several formats, including an exhaustive web map, a sleek slider tool to explore how nature’s values overlap, and a custom reporting function to assess geography in seconds. The map layers are vetted and gathered from local research, regional reports, national models and other sources that provide the best available knowledge on a given environmental land use topic. To help users explore the data and be confident in its use, each layer links to a glossary definition with an explanation and the linked source of the data, while the methodology details how the tool was created. Viewing and interacting with the information under a single platform can begin to tell the user a comprehensive story of what’s there — indicating if there are groundwater basins or proposed regional trails, for example. It can show climate change risk or urban greening opportunity, what policies are in place to protect the land, and conversely, what policies are missing. This makes the Bay Area Greenprint a powerful tool for land use planners, helping them define their strategies and priorities.
In support of the open and democratic exchange of ideas, the Bay Area Greenprint is available for free to anyone who would like to use it. While this tool is a game-changer for practitioners, it does have some limitations. It can’t provide “the answer” of what exact land to protect or how to mitigate, but it can offer guidance based on the user’s own priorities. The Bay Area Greenprint recognizes the complexity of these decisions and is flexible enough to be useful to planners, decisions-makers, and curious residents at any scale.
In a rapidly-changing world, the Bay Area Greenprint must keep pace with changes to stay relevant. To do so, it relies on philanthropic investor funding to keep it breathing and provide for annual updates that reflect current datasets. Initial funding for the tool’s creation was provided by the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation to support the creative and collaborative efforts, a vital peer review process before launching, and initial web hosting. Additional funding to improve the Bay Area Greenprint’s functionality and add new layers was garnered from private donors, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to enhance the Priority Conservation Area program, and Stanford’s Natural Capital Project to showcase their latest research.
M-Group is proud to support the Bay Area Greenprint endeavor by contributing the expertise and services of M-Group Environmental Planner, Adam Garcia (agarcia@m-group.us), who has helped lead the outreach and spatial analysis of this tool.
Check out the tool for yourself at BayAreaGreenprint.org.