The Cuyahoga County Greenprint is a set of mapping and planning tools. It can to help communities see their current resources, learn about current best practices, and create the maps and files needed for grant applications, plan development, meeting presentations, and other day-to-day planning activities.

The Greenprint has two main components:

• The Viewer

  The Greenprint Viewer lets you turn features on and off, zoom to the street and parcel level, access parcel information, measure, make printable maps, and more. It includes a Technical Guide that provides instructions, definitions of the various layers and their sources, and a FAQ.

• The Guide Book

  The Greenprint Guide Book includes a brief history of the County Greenprint, descriptions of Cuyahoga County’s natural features, recommended land use practices for protecting and enhancing nature as well as links to a wide variety of additional resources.

  The Guide Book includes nine sections:

  1. Background
  2. Trails & Bikeways
  3. Water Features & Corridors
  4. Wetlands
  5. Priority Protection Areas
  6. Open Space
  7. Watersheds
  8. Steep Slopes
  9. Land Cover & Tree Canopy

Learning the Greenprint

County Planning periodically offers live, in-person, hands-on Greenprint training. The schedule for these sessions can be found on the training page.

In addition, County Planning has created a series of online video tutorials so that users can educate themselves about the Greenprint Viewer. The first video is an overview of the basic functions and lasts about 24 minutes. The others cover various advanced tools and run about 8 to 10 minutes per video. Each covers a specific tool or set of tools.

Using the Greenprint

The Guide Book, Viewer, and Technical Guide all function to highlight the inventory of natural and man-made features within Cuyahoga County. The Viewer and Technical Guide provide an interactive Geographic Information System (GIS)-based tool for use by urban planners, watershed coordinators, economic development directors, land protection specialists, and other planning and design professionals to promote more effective land use decisions and best practices that:

• Protect people and property from flooding and stormwater events,
• Protect biological diversity,
• Develop a regional trail and greenway system, and
• Provide places where residents can recreate for health and fitness.

The Viewer contains layers which can be turned on and off as needed to illustrate existing environmental conditions and to inform land use decisions. The accompanying Technical Guide contains definitions of the various layers. The layers are grouped by topic and described in the Guide Book. These layers display current parcel-specific data as well as year-specific aerial photography to illustrate how land uses have changed over time. Additional layers provide geographical orientation and include parcel address, transportation (street names), activity nodes, municipal boundaries and land status.

These layers were developed in coordination with local and regional planning, transportation, conservation and watershed organizations, local and regional park systems, and the cities, villages and townships of Cuyahoga County.  County Planning updates the layers on a regular basis in order to keep the Greenprint current.

The Cuyahoga County Greenprint is a resource for communities who seek a balanced pattern of development that can accommodate both redevelopment and land conservation. We hope that this Greenprint will serve as a useful guide in your efforts to protect habitat, improve water quality, and increase landscape and trail connectivity within Cuyahoga County.

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