Kinnickinnic River Restoration

A StoryMap

Telling the story of the river channel and riparian vegetation restoration in real time.

Wisconsin Land Information Association 2023 Best Storymap Award!

About

Resolution Studio and Helianthus, LLC, two landscape architecture firms with combined strengths in ecological restoration and UAV aerial imaging partnered to design riparian restoration planting plans for Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD). Their work includes monitoring vegetation growth for 5 years following installation. Their challenges were:

  1. to present bi-annual monitoring reports in a dynamic way to capture spatio-temporal changes and showcase their drone footage,
  2. to capture monitoring notes in the field and quickly add them to live maps and data
  3. to engage the community in the progress of their urban river restoration
What I do

Silvernail Studio led a storyboarding process with Resolution and Helianthus teams to capture themes, characters, and sequence of the project. From that we created a Storymap Collection, featuring a storymap rich in video, site plans and renderings, and plant data that can be used both as a living report for MMSD and a visually attractive site for community outreach. The Collection also includes separate drone footage and webapps to compare airphotos of the site over time, to explore monitoring data, and to view site photos with planting plans.

For the 2022 field season and beyond, Silvernail customizes Field Maps mobile app to facilitate monitoring of trees, shrubs, and permanent vegetation plots in the field. The field collected data allows for real-time updates to the web maps and dashboards in the Storymap Collection.

Tools Used

ConceptBoard for storyboarding

ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Online to format spatial data and create webmaps

Esri StoryMap Collection

Esri StoryMaps

Esri WebApp Builder

Esri Instant Apps

Esri Field Maps

ArcGIS Dashboards