I Miss My Maps
Looking Back at the Missouri River Center StoryMap
I was digging through old work for my resume recently and found my capstone project again.
Or, more accurately, I found the thing I built for it:
Welcome to the Missouri River Center, an ArcGIS StoryMap created in partnership with The Nature Conservancy's Missouri River Center for Conservation Innovation.
The project was part environmental communication, part GIS, part accessibility exercise, and part giant experiment in asking a question I still care about:
How do you take complicated environmental work and make it understandable enough that people can actually engage with it?
That question has followed me well past graduation.
The project itself
My capstone focused on a donated floodplain property right next to Huntsdale, Missouri, where The Nature Conservancy is working to restore former agricultural land and develop the Missouri River Center for Conservation Innovation.
The challenge was not simply explaining that restoration was happening.
The site involved floodplain ecology, land-use history, agriculture, habitat restoration, wildlife corridors, riparian buffers, wetlands, agroforestry, scientific monitoring, partnerships, and community involvement. That is a lot of information to dump on somebody and then expect them to remain interested.
So the project became an experiment in combining participatory GIS, digital storytelling, and accessible design into something the public could actually explore. My capstone described the StoryMap as a way to connect ecological data, restoration strategies, and community narratives rather than leaving those pieces scattered across technical documents and organizational planning materials.
The final StoryMap is still live here:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e0455967d3e24d7284e5606f134b231f
And finding it again was one of those mildly surreal moments where you look at something you made a year ago and think, oh right, I actually did all of that.
GIS was doing more than making maps
One of the things I liked most about the project was that the maps were not decorative.
They were part of the explanation.
The StoryMap included mapped overlays showing planned areas for wildlife corridors, agroforestry, riparian buffers, wetlands, and other land uses. It also included aerial imagery, site photographs, historical context, restoration visuals, monitoring information, and links to outside resources.
One of the maps included in my final paper showed the planned layout for the donated acreage, with different areas designated for things like wetland restoration, riparian tree planting, agroforestry, wildlife habitat, and tree establishment. Seeing those uses spatially makes them much easier to understand than reading a paragraph that lists them.
That is the part of GIS that still fascinates me.
A map can make a relationship visible.
Where is the wetland in relation to the river?
Where would a wildlife corridor run?
Which areas are being restored as forest, which are being used for agroforestry, and which remain more open?
Where has the land changed?
Where might floodwater go?
A wall of text can explain those things, but a map lets your brain understand them differently.
The Story part mattered just as much as the Map
I also learned that having good spatial data does not automatically mean you have good communication.
The project had to be structured like a story.
I built it around sections including geography and context, site history, land use and restoration planning, The Nature Conservancy's mission, science and monitoring, partnerships, community engagement, and what came next.
A lot of the work was actually deciding what order people needed information in.
You cannot assume someone opening a conservation StoryMap already understands floodplain restoration.
You cannot assume they know why a riparian buffer matters.
You cannot assume they know why agricultural land might be restored differently in different places.
And you definitely cannot assume they will read a technical planning document just because you think the work is important.
That meant translating technical language into plain language, deciding what needed a map, what needed a photograph, what needed a short explanation, and what could simply link out to something more detailed.
The Nature Conservancy staff I worked with gave feedback throughout that process, and the structure, wording, links, and visual organization changed as a result.
That collaborative part mattered.
Environmental communication is not just about being factually correct.
It is also about making sure another human being can follow what you are trying to tell them.
Accessibility was not supposed to be an afterthought
One of the things I am still most pleased with was building accessibility into the project from the beginning instead of trying to bolt it on at the end.
The StoryMap used high-contrast backgrounds, readable fonts, logical heading structure, plain-language descriptions, descriptive alt text, and layouts tested on both desktop and mobile. I also used accessibility tools including WAVE, Esri guidance, and screen-reader evaluation while developing it.
That influenced how I thought about the entire project.
An environmental outreach tool is not especially successful if the information technically exists but a chunk of the public cannot comfortably use it.
And accessibility often makes communication better for everyone anyway.
Clear headings help screen-reader users, but they also help the person skimming on a phone.
Plain language helps people without a technical background, but it also helps the exhausted grad student reading at midnight.
Alt text supports someone who cannot see an image, but writing it also forces the author to ask what the image is actually supposed to communicate.
That thinking has stayed with me.
The project was supposed to keep changing
Another thing I liked about StoryMaps was that the finished product did not have to be frozen.
The project was designed as a living outreach resource that could be updated as restoration work progressed, new photographs became available, monitoring data came in, or community feedback changed what people needed from the site.
My final paper also openly acknowledged the things that were unfinished.
The StoryMap launched late enough that there was limited time for formal community feedback. Some image metadata needed manual review. Formal usability testing and translation were future goals rather than completed pieces.
I actually appreciate that more now than I did while finishing the project.
Environmental work is rarely finished in the satisfying way a school assignment is finished.
You publish something.
You learn something.
Conditions change.
Someone notices a problem.
New data arrives.
Then you update it.
That is much closer to how restoration itself works too.
And I still miss playing with ArcGIS
Finding the StoryMap again also reminded me how much I liked working with GIS.
I do wish I still had access to a tool like ArcGIS.
Not only because I enjoyed making maps, but because there are so many things I write about now where spatial data could strengthen the point I am trying to make.
Heat maps are an obvious example.
If I am writing about urban heat, tree cover, environmental justice, flood risk, access to parks, habitat fragmentation, or even patterns across rural land, being able to build or manipulate a map lets me show the pattern instead of only describing it.
Even some of the things I write about on this blog could become really interesting mapping projects.
Where does extreme heat overlap with low-income neighborhoods?
Where are wetlands being lost or restored?
Where do invasive species occur?
Where are communities most vulnerable to flooding?
How does tree canopy vary across a city?
What does land cover look like around places experiencing the worst summer temperatures?
I could spend an unreasonable amount of time playing with questions like that.
Unfortunately, as an unemployed chronic illness gremlin, some professional tools currently live out of reach.
ArcGIS is one of them.
That is one of the stranger parts of leaving school: while you are a student, you can sometimes access software, journal databases, mapping platforms, datasets, and other professional tools through the institution.
Then you graduate.
Congratulations!
Please return the keys to the research kingdom on your way out.
Access to tools shapes who gets to participate
That is probably the larger thing this old project makes me think about now.
We talk a lot about making environmental work more participatory.
We want community science, independent researchers, and local landowners to understand their ecosystems. We want people outside universities to communicate science. We want rural communities involved in climate adaptation and conservation.
But participation requires tools.
Sometimes those tools are literal field equipment. Sometimes they are transportation. Sometimes they are internet access. Sometimes they are journal subscriptions. And sometimes they are software licenses.
GIS is incredibly powerful partly because it allows people to find relationships that are difficult to see otherwise. If access to that power depends on being employed by the right organization, attending the right university, or having enough disposable income to pay for professional software, then that affects who gets to ask spatial questions and who gets to communicate the answers.
That does not mean useful environmental work becomes impossible without expensive software.
Open-source tools exist. Public datasets exist. QGIS exists. There are free mapping platforms and plenty of ways to keep learning.
But access friction is still real.
Someone with institutional access can have an idea and begin exploring it.
Someone without it may first need to find a free replacement, learn a different interface, determine whether the data work with it, and rebuild skills before they ever get to the original question.
That extra friction matters.
Looking back
My capstone ultimately argued that participatory GIS and accessible digital storytelling could help bridge the gap between restoration science and public participation.
I still believe that.
Probably more strongly now.
The Missouri River Center project combined a lot of things I still care about: ecological restoration, accessibility, science communication, community participation, maps, and figuring out how to take a pile of complicated information and turn it into something a person might actually want to explore.
It also gave me a way to see restoration spatially.
Not just this land is being restored, but:
this section could become wetland.
this area could support trees.
this strip could become a wildlife corridor.
this land used to be agricultural.
this is where the river sits in relation to all of it.
Maps are good at reminding us that environmental problems happen somewhere.
So do environmental solutions.
I may not have my ArcGIS playground anymore, but apparently I still have a lot of things I want to map.
And if someone would like to hand an unemployed chronic illness gremlin a GIS license, I promise I can find something environmentally nerdy to do with it.