Watershed Footprint Atlas

Watershed Footprint Atlas is a web and mobile app that lets communities see, in painful detail, how their daily activities impact local water-based ecosystems. Users enter their address and the app maps them to their actual watershed, then overlays data on runoff risk, impervious surface coverage, local biodiversity hotspots, and pollution incidents. It pulls from open hydrological, land-use, and environmental quality datasets, and combines them with user-reported practices (e.g., lawn care, car washing, fertilizer use) to estimate their household’s contribution to nutrient loading and habitat disruption. The app then aggregates this data into neighborhood- and city-level dashboards, exposing which areas are genuinely improving ecological balance and which are just greenwashing. It’s not a feel-good tree-planting counter; it’s a blunt instrument for showing how specific behaviors and zoning choices degrade or support local ecosystems. The product is realistic: it won’t magically fix watersheds, but it can give local NGOs, municipalities, and engaged residents hard evidence to push for better policies and behavior change.