Understand the framework, build a landscape-specific assessment, and translate spatial data into actionable resilience priorities.
A flexible framework for understanding how landscapes absorb, adapt to, and respond to environmental stress while maintaining essential functions
Resilience is the capacity of a landscape to absorb environmental stress, adapt to changing conditions, maintain essential functions, and recover from disturbance. It is not about preventing change, but about enabling systems to respond dynamically while preserving the ecological and social processes that communities depend on.
The Resilience Scorecard evaluates environmental hazards that are relevant to the landscape being assessed. The framework currently supports six hazard types: drought, extreme heat, flooding, land degradation, severe storms, and wildfire. Because resilience looks different across landscapes, the framework can be adapted using locally relevant hazards, indicators, datasets, and priorities.
Assessments can also be conducted at different spatial scales. Parcels are commonly used where property-level conservation decisions are important, but the framework can be applied to any appropriate user-defined boundary layer.
Follow six core steps to build a landscape-specific resilience assessment.
Start with the landscape, decision-making goals, and spatial units you want to evaluate.
Determine which environmental hazards are most important to your landscape and the decisions the assessment will support.
Identify the landscape characteristics and processes that influence resilience to each hazard, then select spatial datasets to represent them.
Analyze the selected indicators and standardize results to a consistent 1–5 scale to assess resilience to each hazard.
Combine individual hazard assessments using an appropriate weighting approach to reveal overall patterns of resilience and vulnerability.
Use the results to identify resilience anchors, vulnerabilities, restoration opportunities, and areas where conservation or management could strengthen resilience.
Learn how hazard-specific resilience is evaluated and translated into comparable scores.
Not all hazards apply equally across landscapes. Select those most relevant to your assessment and expand each to understand the stress being evaluated and the landscape characteristics that can strengthen resilience.
Drought is a prolonged period of reduced water availability that can stress ecosystems, water resources, and land uses. Resilient landscapes are better able to retain and access water through characteristics such as soil water capacity, groundwater availability, healthy vegetation, and functioning hydrologic systems.
Extreme heat occurs when unusually high temperatures place stress on ecosystems, communities, and infrastructure. Resilient landscapes can moderate temperature extremes through vegetation cover, soil moisture, access to water, and other landscape characteristics that support cooler and more stable local conditions.
Flooding occurs when water accumulates or moves across areas beyond their normal capacity. Resilient landscapes can store, slow, and safely convey excess water through functioning floodplains, wetlands, permeable soils, riparian areas, and natural drainage networks.
Land degradation is the decline of ecological condition or land function through processes such as erosion, vegetation loss, fragmentation, disturbance, or land conversion. Resilient landscapes maintain soil stability, vegetation cover, habitat function, and ecological integrity despite ongoing pressures.
Severe storms can expose landscapes to intense rainfall, high winds, damaging weather, and associated disturbance. Resilience depends on the ability of natural and managed systems to absorb these impacts, maintain function during disturbance, and recover afterward.
Wildfire can alter vegetation, habitat, soils, infrastructure, and other landscape functions. Resilient landscapes reduce vulnerability through characteristics such as appropriate vegetation structure, manageable fuel conditions, lower-risk land cover patterns, and the capacity to recover following fire.
To translate landscape characteristics into comparable resilience scores, the framework follows a consistent analytical process:
Spatial inputs are prepared to a consistent coordinate system and analysis environment before metrics are evaluated. Outputs include hazard-specific scores, composite resilience results, spatial layers, and supporting tables that can be used for mapping, comparison, prioritization, and reporting.
Access customizable hazard frameworks and the ArcGIS Pro toolbox to build and adapt resilience assessments.
Use these templates to understand how indicators are scored and combined within each hazard. Adapt the frameworks using regional conditions, available data, local priorities, and expert knowledge.
Templates are designed to be adapted to landscape-specific conditions, data, and priorities.
Apply the Resilience Scorecard in ArcGIS Pro using your boundary, spatial data, and landscape-specific assessment parameters.
Getting Started
Download the toolbox and add it to your ArcGIS Pro project. Visit the Training page for step-by-step guidance on preparing inputs, running assessments, and interpreting results.
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