About the coalition
The coalition was founded in 2022 by four partners. Its aim is to give cities and organizations in the county shared tools, shared data and a guided way of working together on natural resources.
- Hennepin County
- Three Rivers Park District
- Minnesota Land Trust
- University of Minnesota
The coalition's public home, with its documents, datasets and member pages, is the Hub site.
Current release
Conservation suitability model, V2 draft
The model scores every parcel in Hennepin County for conservation suitability in six categories and ranks them. The November 2026 release has an interactive walk-through of how the model works, a map explorer that re-scores the county under any set of category weights, and the slides. It is a draft for discussion with partners.
Sign-in required. Questions about access: nrp@umn.edu.
What the lab has done
Workshops and geodesign tools
Web tools for the coalition's workshops, where partners mapped and discussed project opportunities, and analysis of what they placed.
The Hub website
Built and maintains the coalition's website, along with editors that partners' content, tool descriptions and data listings are published through.
Partner data and quality checks
Procedures and web apps for receiving partner datasets, checking them, writing their metadata and hosting them for the coalition.
Interactive map
A map for members that brings the coalition's layers and the suitability results together in one place, on the Hub site.
Suitability modeling
The county-wide parcel suitability model: the first version, its validation against partner projects and other agencies' maps, and the 2026 update with partner-set weights.