Ecolibrium: Environmental Mapping Tool

2026 (current)

Product Design (UX/UI), Data Visualization, Public Interest Technology

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About

Ecolibrium is a climate literacy and environmental justice initiative at the Loisaida Center focused on community-driven environmental research in New York’s Lower East Side and East Village. Through hyperlocal analysis and long-term study, the initiative investigates how climate change is materially experienced at the neighborhood level. This work aims to catalyze participatory approaches to understanding ecosystems, mitigating climate change hazards, and protecting human health.

As part of the project, I am designing and developing an interactive mapping tool to support ongoing climate resilience research. The tool helps researchers analyze relationships between solar potential, energy usage, grid infrastructure, and neighborhood-scale environmental conditions in relation to the Cooper Square substation.

Problem & Context

Extreme heat, aging infrastructure, and uneven environmental conditions increasingly impact neighborhoods across New York City, particularly in dense urban areas with inadequate housing. Addressing these challenges requires understanding how environmental conditions emerge from interconnected systems of energy infrastructure, urban development, public policy, and resource distribution rather than from isolated events.

Within Ecolibrium’s broader climate resilience initiative, the mapping tool was developed to help researchers interpret complex neighborhood-scale datasets and identify patterns related to solar potential, air quality, zoning, and energy usage. Existing workflows relied heavily on fragmented datasets and manual analysis, making it difficult to compare information spatially or communicate findings clearly across teams.

Beyond supporting internal research workflows, the project seeks to make infrastructure systems more intelligible and participatory at a community scale. Future public-facing iterations aim to contextualize this data within broader social, political, and economic contexts, examining how supportive infrastructure, climate vulnerability, and quality of life become unevenly distributed across the city.

The project grapples with broader questions around environmental externalities and structural inequity. Particularly, how climate burdens such as heat, pollution, and energy stress are distributed unevenly across communities yet remain difficult to quantify within decision-making systems that prioritize measurable financial outcomes rather than diffuse social and environmental harms.

Project Goals

• Improve workflow for internal research of fragmented environmental and infrastructure datasets

• Create a modular geospatial data pipeline that can evolve alongside future datasets and research initiatives

• Translate technical datasets into a legible public-facing tool to support climate literacy and engagement

My Role

• Contributing to the project’s conceptual framing around responding to environmental hazards through local and systemic approaches.

• Designing and developing a spatial mapping tool for multiple purposes

• Defining information architecture and visualization strategies across datasets

• Integrating and processing multiple NYC open datasets, including MapPLUTO, building footprints, zoning layers, historic districts, and Con Edison network data

• Building workflows in Python to merge, clean, and structure datasets using shared geographic identifiers

• Refactoring and documenting the codebase to improve maintainability and support future project development

Constraints

• Working with fragmented and inconsistently structured open datasets from multiple sources

• Designing intelligible interfaces for dense, technical datasets

• Existing mapping framework limitations constrained tooltip hierarchy, styling, and interaction flexibility

• Project requirements and datasets continue to evolve alongside ongoing research efforts

• Balancing large spatial datasets with browser performance and usability considerations

Design Decisions

Layer-based exploration

Rather than presenting information through fixed charts or static dashboards, the interface was designed around toggleable spatial layers. This allows researchers to compare systems dynamically, investigate relationships between datasets, and construct their own lines of inquiry across environmental and infrastructure conditions.

Modular information architecture

The data pipeline treats each dataset independently before bringing it into the main workflow for further manipulation. Similarly, the data pipeline separates geospatial layers from a larger merged dataset used for contextual building-level information. This architecture improves maintainability and flexibility while allowing new datasets and overlays to be added without restructuring the entire system.

Designing separate interfaces for research and public engagement

While the current tool primarily supports internal research workflows, the project also explores how the interface could be adapted for public-facing climate literacy and community engagement. Future iterations will prioritize accessibility, narrative framing, and educational context differently depending on audience needs.

Current Progress

The tool is currently being developed as part of Ecolibrium’s lab initiative. Current functionality includes layered building footprints, solar potential analysis, zoning overlays, infrastructure mapping, Con Edison network data, and interactive building-level tooltips designed to support exploratory analysis.