Goals:

1. To create an easy and inspiring way to track your impact and tell your story to your audience-- this is your work and you deserve all the credit (along with any partners and funders who you can “tag” on each project);

2. To get us all collecting similar data and compiling it in one place so that we can finally start to see our collective impact at the Puget Sound regional scale.

Sound Impacts was created so that there would be a single place where organizations from across the region could input their restoration and stewardship projects and see just how impactful and far reaching their work really is. There is a lot of great work being done around Puget Sound to both protect and restore the health of its diverse and beautiful natural systems. However, as that work is done it is rarely recorded and what is recorded is almost never consolidated so that people can see and quantify that restorative effort.

Using Sound Impacts to track and analyze your positive impacts

For the practitioner, this portal offers a simple way to process and analyze your overall impacts on the region. Visually compelling and functionally relevant metrics can be generated and used for reporting your efforts and their impact. Using analysis and visualization tools from Tableau, Sound Impacts shows how widely your green fingerprints are distributed and how deep your green footprints go.

1. Registering - to use the site, you will need to create a free account by clicking on the Sign Up button at the top right of your screen. You will receive an email requesting that you confirm your address. Please check your spam or bulk email boxes if you do not receive an email within a few minutes of signing up. 
2. Adding a project - Once you have logged in to the site, you will be able to add new projects using the top menu. 
3. Edit existing projects - To see projects that you have added, click on your username and select My Projects from the dropdown menu
4. Accessing data - the full or filtered data sets can be downloaded from the initial tab of the Tableau dashboard. Scroll to the bottom of the dashboard and click the download icon at the bottom right. Select Data from the option list, and a preview of the data will open up. If you have filtered the project list by partner, or selected within the map area, only the filtered data will be displayed. Data are also published as an ArcGIS Online Map 
5. For help, email us at info@soundimpacts.org 

Methods and Metrics

Because managing stormwater pollution is a top priority for the Puget Sound region and urban areas across the globe, this portal focuses on stormwater metrics. Green infrastructure also has significant spillover benefits in terms of ecosystem services, climate protection, and economic value to adjacent property owners.

Data sources and reliability: Data for this site was provided by partner organizations, and organized by Stewardship Partners and their team. 

Analysis and display of metrics: To create metrics for water managed, carbon-equivalent reductions, and ecosystem and economic value created, we have relied on guidance from Earth Economics. The three key metrics on the dashboard are: 

1. Surface water managed - green infrastructure projects  in gallons per year.  
2. Carbon dioxide removed from atmoshpere - in addition to managing stormwater, tree planting projects capture carbon dioxide and help stabilize the climate
3. Lifetime economic value created - the complete economic analysis includes ecosystem services values (management of stormwater, cleaning of air and water, maintenance of biodiversity), as well as the increase in property values that accrues to the owners of the proparty. The combined total in current year dollars is shown on the dashboards. These estimates assume a 50 year life span for green infrastructure projects with a 3% discount rate on future returns.   

We built this together

Stewardship Partners worked with Community Attributes Inc., and Earth Economics,  with support from the Boeing Company  to create this web-based tool to track metrics related to positive impacts for all entities involved in managing stormwater through restoration and green infrastructure methods.

In addition, we would like to thank all of our partners who contributed data, and engaged with us throughout this process to ensure completeness, integrity and quality of the data. For a complete list of the partners, click on the dashboard link, and use the dropdown menu below the map interface to see and select the partners.