Summary

The USDA Forest Service Office of Sustainability and Climate selected Xentity to support the Climate Risk Viewer, an interactive web mapping tool that brings together authoritative national geospatial data to help managers evaluate climate exposure, vulnerability, resource values, and management intent across National Forest System lands. The Climate Risk Viewer supports climate vulnerability assessments, the Adaptation Workbook, and the USFS Climate Gallery by making complex climate and natural resource information easier to access, compare, and apply.

Beginning in October 2022, Xentity provided technical geospatial support to help build, maintain, and enhance the Climate Risk Viewer. The work combined national scale data organization, ArcGIS Online application configuration, geospatial analysis, documentation, and coordination with Forest Service subject matter experts across climate, carbon, biodiversity, watersheds, firesheds, reforestation, mature and old growth forests, as well as other related resource areas.

Problem and Solution

The Forest Service needed a practical way to organize and share climate risk information across multiple resource topics and geographies. Climate resilience planning requires the ability to view climate exposure, vulnerability, ecosystem values, watershed conditions, carbon, biodiversity, management intent, and related information together in a consistent geospatial environment. Xentity helped coordinate technical input from Forest Service program areas and translated information into a web-based geospatial tool to support planning, assessment, and communication. Our team organized data thematically, supported logical and physical database design, and published enterprise geospatial data via ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Online. This also included configuration and support web applications, user guides, data summaries, tutorials, and documentation. All done in order to help end users better understand and apply relevant data and information.

The Climate Risk Viewer work required both technical geospatial execution combined with information management. This included support for summaries of vector and raster data, maintenance of Climate Risk Viewer information which included source information, compiled metadata, and helped ensure data and application content remained valuable to Forest Service managers, planners, analysts, and partners. The team also supported Esri web apps including StoryMaps and web mapping tools. We did so while capturing workflows for enhancing applications over time.

Outcome and Benefit

Since its beta release, the Climate Risk Viewer has expanded from 28 datasets to more than 140 datasets. Thus, strengthening its role as a national geospatial resource for understanding climate risks across national forests and grasslands. Xentity supported enhancements for useability, improved mapping capabilities and with summaries of spatial data. These improvements helped translate complex national climate and resource datasets into accessible web tools for Forest Service users. This helped explore conditions, compare resource values, and support climate adaptation discussions across National Forest System lands.