Philadelphia, PA, July 23, 2015 — Azavea, in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), is honored to receive a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award at the 2015 Esri International User Conference in recognition of our work on The Nature Conservancy’s Coastal Resilience application, a web-based mapping and visualization platform where ecological, social, and economic information can be viewed along sea level rise and storm surge scenarios in specific geographics. The app enables users to assess such risks, including those to current and future storms, as well as sea level rise scenarios; identify solutions to reduce risks across socio-ecological systems; take action to help communities develop nature-based solutions; and measure effectiveness to ensure efforts are successful. It is powered by Esri’s ArcGIS API for Javascript.
SAG Awards acknowledge vision, leadership, hard work, and innovative use of Esri’s geographic information system (GIS) technology. This is the second time Azavea has been a SAG Award recipient; in 2011 Azavea was recognized for the City of Asheville’s Priority Places web-application.
In 2008, The Nature Conservancy, in collaboration with NOAA Coastal Services Center, the Natural Capital Project, the University of Southern Mississippi and the Association of State Floodplain Managers, began working with local communities and partners to provide information about coastal hazards and climate adaption planning through an approach called Coastal Resilience. The Coastal Resilience network expanded rapidly and now includes 12 U.S. coastal states, four countries in Latin America, and three island nations in the Caribbean. In order to make the data and information more accessible, the Nature Conservancy turned to Azavea to develop a web-based decision support tool — the Coastal Resilience application. The application allows users to interactively examine storm surge, sea level rise, natural resources, vulnerable communities and assets, and to develop risk reduction and restoration solutions.
The Coastal Resilience application was a finalist in a 2014 Esri’s Climate Resilience App Challenge, while the Coastal Defence application, a component of the Coastal Resilence tool, won the award for best Professional and Scientific App for disaster risk reduction at the 2014 United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR)’s Climate Summit.
In addition to TNC, Esri honored more than 170 organizations from around the world and across a variety of industries including agriculture, cartography, climate change, defense and intelligence, economic development, education, government, health and human services, telecommunications, and utilities.
About Azavea – Azavea is a certified B Corporation that applies geographic data and technology for civic and social impact while advancing the state-of-the-art through research. Find out more at http://www.azavea.com/.