About this project
A project of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & Environment (DSE) at UC Berkeley.
In 2020 California committed to conserving 30% of its lands and coastal waters by 2030 — the "30x30" goal — to protect biodiversity, expand access to nature, and build climate resilience. Meeting it depends on knowing what is already conserved, where biodiversity and habitat connectivity are concentrated, and how a changing climate is reshaping the landscape. This app brings the state's 30x30 conservation inventory together with the biodiversity, connectivity, wetland, and climate-hazard datasets that inform those decisions, and pairs them with an AI assistant that can both drive the map and answer quantitative questions about the data.
This is a work in progress — layers, models, and capabilities are being added and refined.
How it works
This app is powered by GLEN, DSE's open-source framework for AI-assisted geospatial exploration. Open datasets stream straight to your browser from cloud-native formats — no tile server in between — and an AI assistant answers questions by writing live queries against the same data. Full technical details are in the GLEN documentation.
🌱 Low-carbon, open models. Be patient. While much faster than most humans, GLEN makes use of more environmentally-friendly AI models. (Check out the
carbon dashboard 🌱 to see the CO₂/energy use of this deployment.)
Exploring the map
The map is built on MapLibre GL — the open-source engine behind the familiar Mapbox-style interactive maps. Scroll or pinch to zoom, drag to pan, and hold Ctrl and drag to tilt and rotate the view. Use the locate-me button in the top-left corner to jump the map to your current position.
The Overlays panel lists every data layer, organized into groups — conserved areas, biodiversity, connectivity, climate, and more. Toggle a layer on or off with its checkbox, and hover any feature for a tooltip of its live attributes — names, categories, ranks, acreages — straight from the source data. When layers overlap, use the send-to-back button (↩) in the Overlays header to drop the topmost layer beneath the others.
Asking the assistant
The Data Assistant understands plain English and does two kinds of things: it can drive the map for you, and it can answer analytical questions about the data. Just type what you want — if it can't do something, it will say so and usually suggest the closest thing it can.
Map operations happen right away on the layers already loaded — no hunting through menus:
- Filter a layer: "Show only GAP status 1 and 2 conserved lands."
- Recolor or restyle a layer: "Color conserved areas by managing agency", "Make the habitat layer 50% transparent."
- Fly somewhere: "Fly to the Sierra Nevada", "Zoom to San Diego County."
- Show or hide layers: "Turn on bird species richness", "Show the historic fire perimeters."
Analytical questions are answered by writing live spatial queries over the underlying data, returning a number or a downloadable table:
- "How many acres of California are conserved at GAP status 1 or 2?"
- "Which ecoregion has the most conserved acreage?"
- "Where is rare-species biodiversity highest relative to its ecoregion?"
✏️ Draw an area to ask about it. Use the draw tool on the map to sketch a polygon — a watershed, a proposed acquisition, a county, anywhere in the state — then ask the assistant about it: "How many acres inside the area I drew are already conserved?", "What habitat types does this polygon contain?", "What's the average biodiversity rank here?" Your drawn shape becomes a live spatial filter for any query.
Data layers & sources
Every layer draws from a public, primary source. Click "STAC" beside any entry to see the full machine-readable metadata — schemas, column descriptions, license, lineage, and download URLs.
Progress & Protections
Conserved Areas, Terrestrial (2025)
California's statewide inventory of lands conserved toward the 30x30 goal — one polygon per conserved unit, attributed with managing agency, access type, and GAP/reGAP biodiversity-protection status (1–4). The primary reference for tracking conservation progress.
California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA) — CA Nature 30x30
Disadvantaged Communities (DAC, 2023)
California disadvantaged and economically distressed communities by census tract (2023), used to track equitable access to nature alongside the conserved network.
CalEPA / OEHHA — DAC & EDA designations
CalEnviroScreen 5.0
OEHHA's cumulative environmental-justice screening tool — a per-census-tract score combining pollution burden and population-characteristic indicators. Useful context for siting and equity questions.
California OEHHA / CalEPA
Ecoregions
Ecoregions (20-class)
California's Bailey/ECOMAP-derived ecoregions as used by the CNRA / ACE program — the standard regional framework for normalizing biodiversity and conservation metrics within the state.
CNRA / ACE — Bailey-derived ecoregions
Habitat Types
CWHR Major Habitat Types (13-class) & Habitat Types (60+ class)
California Wildlife Habitat Relationships vegetation classes derived from CAL FIRE's FVEG statewide vegetation map — a coarse 13-class major-habitat grouping and the full 60+ class typology, both as categorical rasters.
CAL FIRE FRAP — FVEG / CWHR
ACE Biodiversity
ACE Terrestrial Biodiversity Summary
CDFW's Areas of Conservation Emphasis (ACE v3.0) terrestrial biodiversity summary, on a statewide hexagon grid. A single dataset whose columns drive 16 map layers: BioRank and Rare Rank (statewide and ecoregion-normalized, 1–5 quantiles), and native, rare, and endemic species richness for amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) — ACE v3.0 (ds2739)
Biodiversity: Communities, Species & Richness
Plant & Rarity-Weighted Endemic Plant Richness
Modeled plant species richness and rarity-weighted endemic plant richness for California (Kling et al. 2018), as continuous rasters — highlighting centers of overall plant diversity and of range-restricted endemic diversity.
Kling et al. 2018
Freshwater Resources
Freshwater Species Richness (HUC12)
Freshwater species richness summarized by HUC12 subwatershed (Howard et al. 2015 / TNC California Freshwater Species Database) — a choropleth of freshwater biodiversity, including vulnerable and listed species counts.
Howard et al. 2015 / TNC (ds1197)
Wetlands (National Wetlands Inventory)
US Fish & Wildlife Service National Wetlands Inventory, filtered to freshwater emergent, freshwater forested/shrub, and estuarine & marine wetland classes.
USFWS — National Wetlands Inventory
Groundwater-Dependent Ecosystems
Mapped groundwater-dependent ecosystems (Klausmeyer et al. 2018) — vegetation and wetland features that rely on groundwater, provided as separate vegetation and wetland layers.
Klausmeyer et al. 2018 / TNC
Streams by Order & Perennial Streams (NHD)
USGS National Hydrography Dataset stream flowlines — one layer classified by Strahler stream order, and one filtered to perennial streams.
USGS National Hydrography Dataset
Watersheds — USGS WBD (HUC8 & HUC12)
USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset subbasins (HUC8) and subwatersheds (HUC12) — nested hydrologic units for watershed-scale summaries.
USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset
Connectivity & Resilience
Present-day Connectivity & Climate Migration Routes
Present-day terrestrial connectivity categories (Cameron et al. 2022) and modeled climate migration routes (Schloss et al. 2022) — categorical rasters showing where the landscape supports movement today and where species are expected to track suitable climate over time.
Cameron et al. 2022 · Schloss et al. 2022
Regional Connectivity Linkages
South Coast Missing Linkages (Beier et al. 2006) — mapped landscape linkages designed to maintain connectivity between protected core areas, as polygons.
Beier et al. 2006
Climate-Related Risks
Sea-Level Rise Inundation (5 ft)
NOAA sea-level-rise inundation extent at 5 feet — the coastal area exposed under that scenario.
NOAA Office for Coastal Management
Mid-Century Habitat Climate Exposure
Modeled mid-century habitat climate exposure (Thorne et al. 2016), shown here for the CNRM (warm-wet) scenario — higher values indicate habitat more exposed to projected climate change.
Thorne et al. 2016
Historic Fire Perimeters (1878–2025)
CAL FIRE's statewide record of mapped wildfire perimeters from 1878 through 2025, colored by year of burn.
CAL FIRE FRAP — Fire Perimeters
Counties & Reference Boundaries
County, State & Census-Tract Boundaries
US Census TIGER/Line 2024 administrative boundaries — counties, states, and census tracts — for reference and for summarizing metrics by jurisdiction. (Census counties stand in for the CNRA 30×30 county tiling.)
US Census Bureau — TIGER/Line 2024
Browse the full STAC catalog at radiantearth.github.io / stac-browser to explore additional datasets not yet enabled in the app.