ChiVes is a data collaborative and community mapping application that brings data on Chicago’s environment together at the neighborhood level.
Chicago's urban environment has profound impacts on the health of communities and individuals. A handful of key metrics―tree cover, air pollution estimates, heat island effects, traffic volumes, and social vulnerability index― help to reveal where in the city people face particular challenges as we work towards a healthier Chicago.
ChiVes is a data collaborative and community mapping application that brings data on Chicago’s environment together at the neighborhood level. It’s a partnership of researchers, community organizations, and civic groups. With ChiVes, we harmonize & standardize environmental data across dozens of sources to make it accessible for full exploration, alongside a growing list of resources on the Chicago Environment, cultivated by a community of curators.
This project refactors data from the a previous partnership with the City of Chicago, and gets customized as a new opensource platform for the wider community.
This current project version is being managed by the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab (HeRoP) at the Department of Geography & GIScience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in collaboration with the Department of Geography at DePaul University. From 2022-2024, this project is funded in part from NASA to support environmental justice applications in communities. The original ChiVes (refactored data and integration of previous projects) emerged from HeRoP while at the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago by Dylan Halpern with content from M. Kolak, L. Menendez, I. Kamber, and more.
Have data to add? A mapping resource to recommend? We invite you to add more resources to the ChiVes explorer as build out an open data coalition to prepare Chicago for a more resilient future.
Organizations and individuals can participate in ChiVes in multiple ways:
- Data Collaborative. Integrate your data directly. Members agree that the final, integrated data will meet Collaborative standards.
- Resource Guide. Share your web-based or print media resource on the Chicago environment. Resources must meet ChiVes standards.
- Web Development. Developers and code-enthusiasts can fork the ChiVes website, make changes, and submit for review.
View our Standards and Submission Guidelines for more information. These guidelines are evaluated on a regular basis by members of the Data Collaborative.
Learn more on our About page, and feel free to Contact Us with any questions.
There are several ways to get started using ChiVes and exploring Chicago's environment:
Got somewhere you want to explore? Search for an address on the homepage to navigate directly to your neighborhod.
Get a dynamic community report about key indicators and environmental metrics for your neighborhood. Search by your location.
Explore dimensions of the environment across Chicago in an interactive map. Data comes from collaborators across the city!
Discover other maps, data, and resources about the Chicago environment from featured partners and a curated list of resources.
ChiVes uses harmonized, standardized environmental data at the census tract scale including tree canopy characteristics, surface temperature, logged traffic volume, urban flood susceptibility, social vulnerability, hardship, modeled fine particulate matter estimates, and more in Chicago, IL around 2018 (data ranges from 2010-2018). Learn more on the Data page.
See the Standards & Submissions Guidelines for complete information. This resource includes information on:
- Collaborative Guidelines, including data standards, resource guide standards, and web development standards; and
- Submission Guidelines, including an overview of the submission process, publishing data with Google spreadsheets, and a metadata template.
Download the latest version of our data here, or see the Data page:
This data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license.
See Data page.
See Data page.
See the development docs for how to build and run this application.