Happy Birthday!

TNC is a founding partner in an innovative experiment designed to bring focused data, tools, and training to the people charged with addressing the development and environmental challenges facing coastal communities.

NOAA’s Digital Coast website is turning 10 this year. Our partnership has allowed TNC to champion the inclusion of the resources most useful for our members.

Examples include the following.

• Sea Level Rise Viewer. Use the map to pinpoint an area of interest, and then use the slider bar to see how various levels of sea level rise will impact your community.
• Coastal Flood Exposure Mapper. In addition to mapping extent, use this tool to examine the people and natural resources exposed to coastal flooding.
• Green Infrastructure Training. Our members are bringing this training to their communities to jump-start efforts to use nature-based approaches to flood management.
• Risk Communication. The website includes handouts, training programs, and publications that are helping our members make those difficult conversations more productive.
• Coastal Land Cover Data. Maps of intertidal areas including wetlands and adjacent uplands are updated every five years.

Membership in the Digital Coast Partnership has other rewards, too, since the partnership includes the American Planning Association, Association of State Floodplain Managers, Coastal States Organization, National Association of Counties, National Estuarine Research Reserve Association, National States Geographic Information Council, and Urban Land Institute. TNC uses the Digital Coast partnership as an opportunity to forge new working relationships with these groups and uncover similar goals and opportunities to work together.

We’ve also benefited from two Digital Coast fellows, postgraduate students who are helping our organization move our coastal agenda forward and capitalize on the new opportunities afforded us through the Digital Coast Partnership. Through these relationships, we’ve worked with NOAA and the other partners to develop complementary tools and joint training sessions regarding FEMA’s community rating system and the incorporation of natural infrastructure techniques into local resilience planning.

And finally, the Digital Coast provides TNC a means of expanding its reach. Through the Digital Coast website, we are able to expose many of our resources, including the Coastal Resilience mapping toolkit and Atlas of Ocean Wealth, to a broader audience.

So happy birthday, Digital Coast, and here’s to 10 more happy years together! For our TNC members, if you haven’t used the Digital Coast yet, please do. The address is coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast. If you are a current Digital Coast user, please let us know if you have any feedback about this information resource through our Digital Coast representatives Zach Ferdaña or Morgan Chow.