Begin by understanding our approach to resilience, then follow the six-step process to assess your landscape and customize frameworks for your priorities.
Measuring landscape capacity to absorb stress and maintain function
Resilience is the capacity of a landscape to absorb environmental stress, adapt to changing conditions, maintain essential functions, and recover from disturbance. It's not about preventing change! It's about enabling systems to respond dynamically while preserving the ecological and social processes that communities depend on.
This tool focuses on 5 key hazards with the greatest local impacts: drought, extreme heat, flooding, wildfire, and land degradation. Because each hazard manifests differently across landscapes, our framework adjusts to emphasize the most relevant indicators while remaining fully adaptable to any scale, from parcel to any user-defined boundary layer you upload. As new data, stakeholder input, and regional insights emerge, we continuously refine our approach to ensure scores reflect real-world conditions, not generic assumptions.
Follow these six steps to evaluate resilience in your landscape.
Choose from drought, extreme temperature, flooding, wildfire, or land degradation. Each hazard has specific data inputs and analytical metrics.
Define your study area by uploading a shapefile or GeoJSON boundary. This will clip all analyses to your area of interest.
Provide relevant spatial datasets such as wetlands, soil data, elevation, land cover, and other hazard-specific layers.
Select which analytical metrics to include in your resilience assessment. Each metric evaluates a different aspect of resilience.
Fine-tune the relative importance of each metric. Adjust weights based on local priorities and expert knowledge.
Review your resilience scores on an interactive map with detailed attribute tables and downloadable outputs for further analysis.
Learn how each hazard is evaluated and how resilience scores are calculated.
Not all hazards apply equally to every region. Select those relevant to your landscape and expand each to understand the risk and the features that build resilience against it.
Drought is a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall that reduces water availability. Resilient landscapes retain moisture through high soil water capacity, accessible groundwater reserves, and drought-adapted vegetation that maintains water availability even during extended dry periods.
Extreme heat refers to prolonged periods of unusually high temperatures that stress ecosystems and communities. Resilient landscapes buffer temperature extremes through dense canopy shade, proximity to cooling water bodies, and soil moisture that moderates microclimates and protects ecosystems during heat events.
Flooding occurs when water overwhelms drainage systems and covers land that is normally dry. Resilient landscapes absorb and slow excess water through permeable soils, intact floodplains, and natural drainage features that reduce runoff velocity and minimize erosion during storm events.
Wildfire is uncontrolled combustion that spreads rapidly through vegetation and threatens ecosystems and infrastructure. Resilient landscapes resist fire spread through managed fuel loads, strategic vegetation breaks, and low-risk land cover patterns that limit fire intensity and protect critical assets and habitats.
Land degradation is the decline in land quality and productivity due to erosion, vegetation loss, or cumulative stress. Resilient landscapes maintain stability through intact vegetation cover, connected habitats, and minimal soil disturbance that preserves ecosystem function and resists decline over time.
To translate landscape characteristics into actionable scores, the tool follows a consistent analytical process:
Analyses clip to your boundary, align to a common CRS, and normalize metrics before weighting. Outputs include map layers, summary scores, and exportable tables for reporting.
Access customizable frameworks and guides to support your resilience assessments and adaptations.
Use these templates to understand how each hazard's metrics are scored and combined. Customize the frameworks based on your regional conditions, local priorities, and expert knowledge to create your own resilience assessment.
Templates are designed for partners and field teams to tailor scoring locally.
Run analyses locally in ArcGIS Pro for larger datasets, batch processing, and advanced parameter control.
Quick usage
ArcGIS_Toolbox.zip..tbx to your Catalog.Quick guidance to improve data quality and make results more actionable.