Overview

The Resilient Land Mapping Tool is created by The Nature Conservancy to help decision-making in the face of climate change. This tool defines resilient and connected lands across the continental U.S. by providing scores for climate change resilience, landscape connectedness, and landscape diversity for both points and areas at a town-parcel scale.

The first map layer calculates resilience based on “natural strongholds”– areas that are resilient to climate change because of their geophysical and biological diversity. A second map layer calculates landscape permeability, which is defined as how well organisms can move within regions of many land cover types. The resilience and landscape permeability maps combine to make the resilient and connected network map– providing information on biodiversity, connectedness, and resilient lands all in one place.

Examples of how to use this tool: 

• Get interactive summary statistics of resilience and connectedness for a parcel of land by uploading a shapefile, or by drawing your own polygon on the map.
• Look at the climate flow patterns for your town or county– are species range shifts through your area likely?
• Download the data to add your own spatial layers into the mix, and run your own analyses.

Utility for Management:

• Identifying resilient lands can guide decisions on land acquisition, restoration, and management practices.
• Because some land cover types– such as urban areas– impede organism movement and thereby landscape permeability, predicting how climate-shifting species move across the land is useful to conservation.
• Predicting areas of high flow of range-shifting species can help identify potential invasion corridors. 
• Visit this site for more resources on the map and its potential uses.

Resilient lands and waters shown on this map may be conserved by a wide range of measures from good land stewardship, to other forms of private land conservation, to outright fee or easement acquisition by various levels of government.