The Context & The Erosion Threat
Coastal bluffs throughout Maine's Casco Bay are experiencing accelerated erosion, driven by severe seasonal storms, tidal surges, and shifting sea levels. While academic and state institutions had compiled detailed geological datasets, the information was trapped in academic whitepapers, unwieldy spreadsheets, and specialized GIS databases.
Local municipal planning boards, conservation trusts, and island residents needed to make immediate infrastructure and zoning decisions, yet lacked a clear, accessible way to interpret slope stability or track localized erosion changes over time.
"Civic platforms fail when scientific precision isn't matched with clear information architecture. Our goal was to make complex coastal hazard data intuitive enough for any town planner or volunteer monitor to act on."
Synthesizing GIS Mapping & Citizen Science
I led the UX architecture and end-to-end platform design for the Calling Your Bluff toolkit:
- Interactive Spatial Mapping: Layered slope risk indices, historical bluff movement data, and parcel boundaries into a responsive GIS map interface designed for both desktop analysis and mobile field reference.
- Citizen Science Monitoring Protocols: Structured standardized step-by-step guides for community volunteers to photograph, measure, and record local bluff retreat consistently.
- Risk Tier Visualization: Translated dense geological taxonomy (shear stress, vegetative stability, soil types) into clear, color-coded vulnerability tiers with concrete mitigation checklists.
Impact Across Casco Bay Communities
The platform bridges the gap between high-level NOAA climate research and local grassroots decision-making:
- Actionable Resilience: Empowered municipal boards across Casco Bay to prioritize shoreline stabilization and infrastructure setbacks based on empirical data.
- Universal Accessibility: Engineered according to WCAG 2.1 standards, ensuring high contrast readability in outdoor field conditions across low-bandwidth island connections.
- Scalable Civic Infrastructure: Built an expandable information architecture capable of being adopted by other coastal regions across New England.