Janet Silbernagel, PhD, ASLA, SITES AP

The Bloom Development was an urban design project driven by high-bar sustainability goals. Silvernail Geodesign was contracted in 2022 to advance the “Neutral Standard” of the developer to evolve mixed-use and multi-family real estate development with carbon-neutral approaches through innovative sustainable landscape design and SITES® certification preparation.

As the landscape designer/landscape architect along with Helianthus Design, we provided concept design sketches all the way to contract drawings and specifications. Our conscientious landscape design maximizes site sustainability through around three areas:

• Rainwater Collection
• Plaza Design
• Edible Garden

In our team’s role as SITES consultant, we guided early design decisions to pro-actively meet sustainability goals. SITES certification stamps land development projects as having met a high bar for innovative sustainable design.

Communities, businesses, and farms surrounding Black Earth Creek were hit hard by flooding in August 2018. Black Earth Creek is a high-quality cold-water trout stream just west of Madison, Wisconsin that flows through three villages, across farmland, and attracts recreationists for fishing, kayaking, and other activities.

Silvernail Geodesign was  part of a team  working with  local partners  and communities to identify where we can best locate green infrastructure practices, or landscape features to catch rainwater where it falls, to be most effective at improving flood resiliency and enhancing water quality.

To foster collaboration and community engagement in the project, Silvernail built an ArcGIS Hub Initiative. Hub allowed us to share maps, events, and other content, and invite community followers to provide feedback in the process.

As the project progressed, we added an interactive web app with Smart Editor inviting community followers to add locations they thought would be good for green infrastructure. At the close of the project, we transferred the Black Earth Creek Watershed Green Infrastructure Plan Hub Initiative to Capital Area Regional Planning Commission as a final deliverable, as shown here. This Hub site will live on as a dynamic reference on the client’s web site.

In my second month as Geospatial Solutions Director for Steigerwaldt Land Services, Inc., I led our GIS team who previously had little opportunity for creative cartography or StoryMap creation, in the design of this award-winning Storymap. Our goal was to highlight the tree farm part of the business while also exploring our skillsets as a team and building team comraderie.

As a GIS educator, thought leader, and design strategist, I wanted to foster better GIS coordination across our large and disperse campus and facilitate course selection for students. To do so, I implemented a unique application of WebApp Builder by creating a curriculum course matrix as an interactive image. The goal was then to connect the matrix to a campus map, walk times, etc. This StoryMap illustrates the first elements of UW-Madison's Campus Matrix. It was originally published in 2020, and updated recently to share publicly. Course data and contacts may no longer be correct.

This project, started in 2010, is still a living and active portal for the community today. My team led the stories, or Spatial Narratives, side of this project, which are told through six vignettes of local resource activities, framed by perspectives of local people.

The science is based on Stressor Gradients research, incorporating factors such as population and road density, pollutant point source density, and land use.

The stories and science are interwoven, located in place on a Deep Map to illustrate the complexity and multiple perspectives within the estuary’s social, economic and ecological systems. Students, decision-makers, and Lake Superior enthusiasts can engage more deeply in the complexity of the stories and science by challenging themselves with GeoQuests played on mobile devices.  

This project was funded jointly by the Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute and the Minnesota Sea Grant College Program, both supported by the NOAA National Sea Grant College Program, United States Department of Commerce, 2010-2014. The Restoration Vignette was funded independently through a grant from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, May-Dec 2014 and updated/enhanced through a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Mar-Oct 2015.

Wrapping up the Science and Stories of the St.Louis River Estuary project (previous slide), we realized that WE were the authors. The next step in our vision would be a way for communities to create and tell their OWN spatial narrative. Such spatial narratives could enrich our understanding of, and appreciation for, places and the collective value they hold for the people who live and visit there.

Hearing this, Jack Dangermond, President of Esri, invited us to work with their Applications Prototype Lab. Together we set out to develop something new that would allow communities to create place-based stories around topics relevant to them. We called these spatial narrative geotools. And here is their story….