Green Infrastructure Project

Today, I’ve spent time exploring a case study in ArcGIS: the Green Infrastructure Project. One of my coworkers, Gary, had sent me materials on the Esri Green Infrastructure Project, including their current website, after hearing my interest in protecting open space and greenways in urban and rural areas. I dove more into the background and goals of this project through watching an EDGE Speaker Series presentation from Hugh Keegan, a leader of the Applications Prototype Lab and this initiative, from April 27, 2018. (The EDGE Speaker Series is an internal Esri speaker series, and stands for Engage, Discover, Grow, @ Esri.)

Landscape architecture has its roots in the United States. Frederick Law Olmstead’s “Emerald Necklace” is one of the first case studies for consciously connected greenspace. The city of Boston grew up around this connected greenspace, and serves as one of the first green infrastructure examples in urban planning.

The foundational idea of green infrastructure is to connect “cores” and “corridors,” which is also exemplified by concepts of island geography. Cores are defined as ecological areas greater than 100 acres in diameter, generally, to protect against edge effects and preserve internal biodiversity. Corridors serve to connect cores, to allow for gene flow, migration, and decreased traversal cost to reach habitats.

Jack Dangermond, the co-founder and president of Esri, has been passionate about green infrastructure for many years. Seeing the potential for Esri to assist in documenting and increasing green infrastructure using ArcGIS, and being wildly inspired by the green infrastructure work of Arancha Munoz-Criado, Jack proposed that Esri pioneer a National Green Infrastructure System. This system would include an inventory of ecological, cultural, and visual assets, as well as hazard areas, which could be used to negotiated land conservation, development, and preservation. This system would consolidate all valuable landscapes into one map, and include areas of connection to habitat cores as well as urban space.

I especially liked a term that Hugh Keegan shared in his EDGE presentation: Forest Bathing. Forest Bathing is a term to describe being enveloped in green space, and is an actual Japanese public health initiative! I look forward to looking up how Japan is defining and implementing this initiative, which feels like a great term to tack on to fleshing out “wilderness therapy.”

Esri already helps to map and partner with many conservancies, including the American Prairie Reserve. However, with the Green Infrastructure Project, Esri hopes to connect these already developed initiatives, and create mapping resources covering and accessible to regional, local, and urban scales.

Though the Applications Prototype Lab is not often involved in projects of this magnitude, dealing intimately with data, under Hugh Keegan, the lab began to scaffold this project. Most of the project flow is based on an adaptation of Karen Firehook’s “Evaluating and conserving green infrastructure.” They created 550k habitat core polygons, with 50 derived variables available on hover over these cores. These are also filterable, and include a ranking feature to establish areas of greatest importance. The goal is that this ranking can be done by users, though I am slightly unclear on this aspect of the project. They also packaged publicly available data into one package available for user download, to consolidate authoritative data sources in this area and make the data more widely available to a larger audience and user base. This is all a web-based application.

Jack’s intent is for all of this to be free and readily available to regional, local, and urban levels of stakeholders. This will be converted into a Green Infrastructure Utilities web map, as well as a Green Infrastructure template in Living Atlas. The hope is that this resource would be continuously used by zoning boards and planning commissions, to make decisions about the future of cities and land management to connect key areas of biodiversity, especially in the most biodiverse region of the United States: the southeast.

There are still aspects of this project that need updating. The current initiative used the 2009 National Land Cover dataset, which probably needs to be swapped for more current land cover data. Also, this initiative does not currently have a comprehensive, live web application, with good SEO (how can we help…?). There is also talk of this becoming a global initiative.

Some last takeaways that are interesting to note:

• There is a yearly Convention on Biological Diversity, which the US is not currently participating in. This is an available issue to contact congress people about.
• 50% of the core polygons mapped by this first initiative were less than 500 acres in size. It is key to preserve large cores, and it is concerning that a growing number of cores are small in size, or disconnected.
• This Green Infrastructure website needs to be current.

Additionally, following this EDGE talk with Hugh Keegan, I watched a presentation by the inspiration for this project, Arancha Munoz-Criado. She is incredibly cool, and I look forward to diving into more of her work. She planned and implemented green infrastructure in Valencia, Spain, which was a case study and inspiration Jack looked to inspire this project. She also commented on the EU’s Nature 2000 initiative, which I will look into, which seeks to establish green infrastructure across the European Union.

With all of the elaboration on this project, I have the same giddy hope as these key players in this project that Esri could help to establish the most valuable landscapes to both biodiversity and landscape identity BEFORE land development is even discussed. I hope to follow this project, and see it improve, and be widely implemented in a web-based application.