Cuyahoga County is leveraging innovative web-based tools known as the Green Print to empower planners, environmental advocates, and community leaders. This platform visualizes crucial natural and community assets on an interactive map, facilitating informed decisions about nature and land use.
This dynamic platform is designed for customization, allowing users to extract specific data for grant proposals, detailed reports, and engaging community events. We are confident that these Green Print tools will be instrumental in your endeavors to cultivate a more sustainable and ecologically rich Cuyahoga County.
Our Vision for a Balanced Future
Cuyahoga County is committed to fostering an environment where both humanity and nature flourish in harmony. To realize this vision, it is essential that our elected officials, community leaders, developers, and landowners adopt effective land management strategies and embrace best practices that:
- Enhance the region’s resilience and appeal in the face of climate change.
- Safeguard communities and infrastructure from the increasing threats of floods and severe storms.
- Preserve and enrich the region’s biodiversity.
- Establish a comprehensive, multi-modal transportation network, featuring an extensive system of non-motorized trails and greenways.
- Expand, improve, and maintain outdoor recreational spaces to support health, wellness, and enjoyment for all.
Exploring the Green Print Components
The Cuyahoga County Green Print, a project of the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, provides a suite of mapping and planning tools designed to support communities and their personnel—particularly planners—as well as civic and environmental leaders, conservationists, and developers. These resources offer users the ability to visualize current natural and built assets, access information on contemporary best practices, and generate maps and documents essential for grant applications, strategic planning, presentations, and other initiatives focused on environmental enhancement.
The Green Print is structured around three core components:
The Explorer: Your Interactive Mapping Tool
The Green Print Explorer, the interactive map interface, allows users to explore the geographical and feature-based characteristics of Cuyahoga County. Users can customize their view by toggling relevant datasets on and off, gaining detailed insights into land attributes, performing measurements, creating printable maps, and much more. The Explorer is intuitively divided into two main sections:
- Data: This section manages layers within 11 distinct groups for visual clarity. Additionally, a themes area provides quick access to pre-configured sets of layers, such as ‘Conservation & Protected Land’.
- Tools: This area is equipped for drawing, searching, and querying functionalities, enabling users to find specific information or combinations of data.
The Manual: Your Guide to Green Print Navigation
The Green Print Manual serves as a comprehensive guide on utilizing the Explorer and its associated tools. It offers step-by-step instructions, definitions of various data layers, information on their sources, update timelines, and a helpful Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section. Accessible directly from the Explorer, the Manual is organized into key sections:
- Instructions
- Layers
- Themes
- Tools
- FAQs
- Data Sources
The Guidebook: Understanding the Context of Green Print
The Green Print Guidebook provides a historical overview of the County Green Print initiative and detailed descriptions of Cuyahoga County’s natural features. Complementary to the Manual, the Guidebook focuses on explaining the subject matter behind the data, aiming to educate users on crucial environmental topics.
The Guidebook is structured into seven chapters, each further divided into five sections:
- What’s Covered: Links to relevant data layers or layer groups that visually represent the topic.
- Overview: Provides essential context for the data layers and related information.
- Importance and Value: Explains the significance of these topics in achieving and sustaining a balanced region that integrates harmoniously with the built environment.
- Recommendations for Communities and Landowners: Offers Best Practices for informed land use and riparian decisions, policies, and actions.
- Resources for More Information: Includes hyperlinks to external organizations, additional information, and related tools for further exploration.
Training and Engagement with Green Print
The County Planning Commission regularly conducts virtual and occasionally in-person training sessions to help users effectively utilize the Green Print tools.
Utilizing Green Print and Sharing Your Feedback
The Cuyahoga County Green Print is an invaluable resource for communities striving to achieve a balanced development approach that supports both urban revitalization and environmental conservation. We are dedicated to ensuring that this Green Print serves as an effective guide in your efforts to adapt to climate change, protect vital habitats, enhance water quality, and improve landscape and trail connectivity throughout Cuyahoga County.
We welcome your feedback to help us improve. Please share your thoughts.
Top photo by Jason Cohn, courtesy of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy
