Have you ever wanted a quick and easy way to explore the Southeast Blueprint and learn more about the underlying data for your area? The online viewer for the Southeast Blueprint is designed to help you do just that, and a beta version is finally ready for public release!

You can access the beta viewer here. It’s mobile friendly, so you can even check it out on your phone! It’s linked from the Blueprint and Resources pages of the SECAS website. Here are some of the things you can do with this beta viewer!

• Get a detailed pdf report including custom maps and analysis of the Blueprint, underlying plans, indicator datasets, threats, and protected lands information—just upload a shapefile!
• Learn what subregional plans are driving conservation value in your area. In some subregions (Florida, South Atlantic, and Nature’s Network), you can dig deeper into the underlying indicators that are driving those priorities.
• See how urbanization and sea-level rise are predicted to impact your area, as well as the conserved status and ownership of protected lands.
• Quickly connect with user support if you’d like help using the Blueprint or understanding how it works.

The viewer is considered a beta version because it doesn’t yet include the full suite of planned features. We want to add indicator data for more of the underlying Blueprint plans, and the improved consistency of the upcoming major revision to the 2022 Blueprint will make that much more feasible. We’d also like to incorporate hubs and connectors information from the Blueprint into the viewer and reporting to highlight areas important for connectivity. In addition, we’d like to add a “pixel mode” feature that allows a user to drill into each underlying pixel of the Blueprint, the smallest possible unit of the prioritization, to see exactly how it scores in the underlying data.

As part of our commitment to tailoring our plans and tools to user needs, the current beta viewer has undergone testing with several Blueprint users who generously volunteered their time. This helped enormously in fixing some early problems and confusing features. But, as always, it’s still a work in progress. If you have a suggestion on how to improve the viewer, feel free to reach out to hilary_morris@fws.gov. Your feedback would be very helpful as we move into the next phase of refining the beta viewer and adding additional features!

If you’d like a more in-depth tutorial on how to use the beta viewer, you can watch a recording of the March 18th webinar where the South Atlantic user support team gave a live demonstration of an earlier iteration of the beta viewer. If you look closely, you might notice some of the things we changed in response to user testing feedback!