Data-Driven Impact with Raenah Bailey
When Dr. Raenah Bailey joined the LegacyWorks Sentinel Landscapes team as the Midwest Resilience Specialist for the Southern Indiana and Camp Ripley Sentinel Landscapes, she took on a role that demanded both scientific expertise and creative problem-solving. Her pressing challenge: helping communities prepare for natural disasters and long-term environmental risks by making sense of complex natural hazard and ecological data.
Her solution came through a tool built on her specialty—Geographic Information Systems (GIS). With a background that stretches from water quality research to stormwater modeling and now a Ph.D. in Applied Earth Sciences, Raenah has been working with GIS since she was 18. Over the years, she has watched the technology evolve from clunky software into a powerful engine for resilience planning, and she has grown right alongside it.
At Camp Ripley, Raenah was handed the results of a natural hazard assessment and asked to “do something with it.” And "do" she did. Raenah developed a decision-support tool that prioritized parcels for resilience funding within Soil and Water Conservation Districts, addressing the lack of clarity in understanding the relative importance of different land parcels. By translating raw datasets into parcel-level scores, her web-based application enables users to identify areas most vulnerable to drought, temperature extremes, flooding, wildfire, and land degradation, as well as those already demonstrating resilience. For land managers, local governments, and even land trusts, this visualization provides a clear roadmap: where to act, what to protect, and how to plan.
Dr. Raenah Bailey’s Resilience Scoring Tool backed by GIS data.
One of the tool’s greatest strengths is accessibility. Even those without a GIS background can upload data, select hazards, and generate color-coded maps that show resilience levels across parcels. More advanced users can dive deeper, but for many, the immediate value is being able to see—at a glance—how their land or community might withstand environmental stressors.
Raenah emphasizes that the tool isn’t just about identifying weak spots.
“People often focus on the red—on what’s least resilient,” she explained. “But the green areas matter just as much. Protecting the land that’s already resilient is critical for the future.”
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. When she presented the tool at the Land Trust Alliance Rally, Raenah left with more than fifty emails from other sentinel landscapes, land trusts, conservation groups, and local leaders eager to use it in their own regions. Initially designed for Camp Ripley, the tool is proving adaptable far beyond Minnesota. By giving landscapes the flexibility to plug in their own datasets—whether at the state, county, or local level—Raenah created something that scales nationally.
Raenah views GIS as both a technical tool and a means to analyze and present data to tell meaningful stories. She hopes that maps built with this tool can bridge divides, helping local communities visualize the reality of environmental hazards in their own backyards.
“It’s not necessarily about convincing people… The data evidence supports the droughts and other hazards that we’re experiencing,” she said. “So, it’s about showing them that what they’re experiencing—drought, flooding, extreme heat—has evidence behind it, and that there are steps we can take together to build resilient landscapes and communities.”
Raenah embodies the vision and technical expertise necessary to empower communities, agencies, and partnerships, such as Camp Ripley Sentinel Landscape, through accessible and practical tools. Her work highlights the importance of making it easy to assess risks and needs, enabling partnerships to make informed, community-driven decisions about where and how to invest in resilience. It’s not just about GIS as a tool; it’s about harnessing that tool to create a future in which people and landscapes can thrive together.