Visualize a Resilient Watershed

November 20 marks the 25th annual GIS Day, an international event that highlights the power of geographic information system (GIS) technology to create, manage, analyze, and map all types of data. At Friends of the Chicago River, we apply GIS technology to create, collect, and share watershed-mapped information. The power of GIS spans across all our program areas to inform where and how we focus our efforts. We also utilize it externally to help people visualize and understand our vision for a healthy and continuously connected blue-green river corridor that supports the needs of all people, water, and wildlife across the watershed.

This year's GIS Day theme, "Mapping Minds, Shaping the World," underscores the collaborative nature of GIS and highlights the incredible potential of individuals, organizations, and communities uniting to harness spatial data for positive change. 

“GIS is a powerful tool for the environmental field and we apply it to a wide array of projects at Friends,” said Amy Heldman, Friends’ Senior Planner and GIS Manager. “I always look forward to collaborating across our different program areas to see how we can advance our work with spatial datasets, maps, and visualizations. Combined with our policy and on-the-ground expertise, GIS is an invaluable resource in our work to create a more resilient watershed future.”

GIS technology is at the core of our award-winning Natural Solutions Tool that empowers decision makers and community leaders to defend against environmental injustice and degradation and to identify locations in the watershed with the greatest need and opportunity for equitable investments in natural systems. Created as part of our Greater Chicago Watershed Alliance, Friends and our partners at the Trust for Public Land developed and launched the Natural Solutions Tool in March 2023. With the support from the Daybreak Fund, the tool is expanding next year to incorporate all of Lake County to provide a more holistic context to the state of natural solutions in the region and to include more partners in the county.

The free, publicly available, and custom-built tool incorporates over 150 data layers that allow users to visualize and customize data to address complex environmental challenges and substantiate the work to address them. To date, Friends has trained more than 650 individuals from over 40 groups to use the innovative tool to inform their work in the watershed. In its short existence, the Natural Solutions Tool has been a significant data resource to capture millions of dollars of additional funding for nature-based investments for our watershed.