Designing Sustainable Landscapes (DSL) is a landscape conservation initiative spanning 13 states in the Northeastern United States. This project provides strategic guidance for habitat conservation by evaluating ecological integrity, regional connectivity, and habitat suitability for key species across the region.Assessments consider both the current state of the landscape and projections of future conditions influenced by urban growth, climate change, and sea level rise.
This initiative has produced a web app that allows you to easily view the Index of Ecological Integrity (IEI) and ecoConnect across the Northeast. The app includes a site scoring tool that produces a report with IEI and ecoConnect scores for a project area, either drawn on the map or uploaded as a shapefile. EcoAssess is available at umassdsl.shinyapps.io/ecoassess.
DSL is a project of the Landscape Ecology Lab at the University of Massachusetts (which includes CDS staff members), and is supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s North Atlantic-Appalachian Region, the Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (NE CASC) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.