During a symposium at the New York Botanical Garden last week, senior staffer Betsy Ladyzhets learned about an site that allows users to play with the environmental conditions of New York City, and she found it cool enough to share here.

Have you ever wondered what NYC looked like what the first Europeans landed here in 1609? Or are you perhaps interested in how NYC could look in the future, if our city follows the lead of other, more sustainable cities around the world and implements policies to combat climate change? If either of those questions appealed to you, Visionmaker NYC is probably your next procrastination device.

Visionmaker NYC is a site developed by the Welikia Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society (the nonprofit responsible for running the Bronx Zoo, as well as other research and conservation projects around the world). This team of researchers worked on collecting ecological information on the history of NYC, starting with Manhattan, then working outward to the other boroughs. This research has focused on the city’s biodiversity; the researchers hope to find out what NYC lacks in plant and animal communities, and what we could be doing better in order to preserve the wildlife in and around the city.

One major piece of the Welikia Project is public education – bringing the information that researchers have collected to non-scientists of NYC.  The Visionmaker site is a major part of that educational message: it allows users to explore the NYC of the past (“Welikia” means “my good home” in Lenape) and create their own visions for NYC of the future, by adjusting general lifestyles, precipitation levels, and other pieces of the wider NYC environment.

I spent some time playing around with the site today, particularly focusing in on Columbia – we’re (literally) greener than many other parts of the city, but we clearly still have a long way to go.

Images screenshotted from visionmakernyc