NSF2026: EAGER: Designing high performing novel landscapes to tackle climate change using gamification & crowdsourcing

Environmental change will disproportionately affect cities, making adaptation and mitigation efforts critical. Urban greenspaces are essential to these efforts and provide additional benefits like recreation and neighborhood beautification that play an important role in the well-being of residents. As part of wider goals for creating resilient and livable cities, many local governments are aiming to develop and enhance greenspace and tree cover.

Research suggests that urban greenspaces function best when they meet community-specified needs and are connected to other natural areas inside and outside of cities. Unfortunately, it can be both time and cost prohibitive to engage residents in the design of greenspace and difficult to ensure connectivity. To address these challenges this project develops Land.Info, an interactive Decision Support Tool (DST) that combines realistic 3D visualizations and a user-friendly interface to facilitate meaningful community engagement in the design of urban greenspace at multiple scales.

An online crowdsourcing approach will be used to encourage broad participation and the creation of high-performance designs. This collaborative approach will ensure a larger role for communities in the creation and management of these landscapes by highlighting the important connection between community needs and functioning greenspace.

The award enriches the NSF2026 Idea Machine winning entries Large Landscape Resilience by Design and Designing Ecosystems for the Future NSF Idea Machine entries. The aim is to create a transformative approach to community-engaged greenspace design for environmental resilience in cities by developing, implementing, and evaluating the Land.Info DST. Land.Info will present the user with a realistic 3D model coupled with a dashboard showing scale-appropriate city- and regional-level environmental resilience targets.

The dashboard provides real-time feedback about site-scale performance in relation to selected metrics, and contribution to larger landscape-scale connectivity and resilience. The system will provide feedback to participants based on the performance of the designs, and the DST will be deployed online in order to crowdsource numerous design alternatives.

Qualitative and quantitative methods will be used to evaluate effectiveness of the DST, the collaborative approach, and design outputs. The project will be conducted in Detroit, MI, and New Orleans, LA, cities vulnerable to extreme events producing stormwater and coastal flooding, and each grappling with broader challenges of urban renewal. The research will potentially benefit residents and decision makers through the creation of new tools and approaches to support community-engaged design of urban greenspace for enhanced resilience, socio-ecological functioning, and human well-being.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.