CCS Knowledge Map

About

A community-centered environmental knowledge project

The CCS Knowledge Map helps communities, researchers, and public agencies explore environmental survey responses and assess who is represented in those responses.

Listen

Gather community experiences, priorities, and local knowledge through surveys and engagement.

Understand

Connect responses with geography and demographic context without reducing communities to a single score.

Act

Support more inclusive environmental communication, outreach, and public decision-making.

Project background

The project works with local government agencies and community organizations to better understand the needs, perceptions, and concerns of Black and Latinx communities facing environmental challenges in Wisconsin.

Since summer 2022, the team has combined in-person community forums with the digital Community Climate Solutions engagement platform. These activities have invited residents to share experiences related to urban heat, air quality, tree canopy, energy, and environmental justice.

The Knowledge Map has two connected purposes: to visualize community responses and to help users examine the demographic representativeness of survey participation. The tool is intended to strengthen interpretation and outreach—not to replace community relationships or research judgment.

Team

Faculty

  • Dr. Corey Jackson

    School of Information, University of Wisconsin–Madison

  • Dr. Kaiping Chen

    Department of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Developers

  • Christian Varner

    PhD student in Statistics

  • Niharika Chunduru

    Master’s student in Statistics and Data Science

  • Shelcia David

    Master’s student in Information

  • Tanisq Jawahar

    Bachelor’s student in Computer Science, AI, and Data Science

  • Abhishek Sharma

    Master’s student in Computer Science

Researchers

  • Corey Black

    Master’s student in the School of Information

  • Vincent Kong

    Undergraduate student in Computer Science, graduated 2023

  • Vaathsalya Karpe

    Undergraduate student, graduated 2023

  • Kyla Smith

    Master’s student in Energy Analysis and Policy

Community and public-sector partners

Wisconsin EcoLatinos
Urban Triage
Dane County Office of Energy & Climate Change
City of Madison

Open-source project

The current application is built with Next.js and is maintained in the MadCollab GitHub organization. Earlier versions of the Knowledge Map were developed in R Shiny.

View the current source repository

Citing the Knowledge Map

When referencing analyses or visualizations from this application, identify the tool as the “CCS Knowledge Map,” include the application URL, and describe the dataset, geography, and analysis settings used.