The NY-NJ Harbor & Estuary Program (HEP) brings together federal, state, and local agencies, academic institutions, and nonprofits across two states to protect and restore the Hudson-Raritan Estuary. Its Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) sets shared priorities for the next decade and reports on the estuary's health, using data that many partners collect in different ways across a wide range of indicators.

We designed and built the CCMP as one platform with three connected parts. The State of the Estuary presents environmental trends through analysis, maps, and data visualizations, along with a printed summary brochure and a presentation deck. The Action Agenda sets out the shared goals and commitments of HEP and its partners. The Environmental Monitoring Map is an interactive inventory of active, continuous, and historic monitoring across the watershed. For each indicator, we explored the data and tested visual approaches until we found one that suited both the data and its audience. We also highlighted connections between indicators so readers can move easily between goals, data, and ongoing work.

The plan is built on a design system we've developed with HEP since 2018. It covers HEP's priority areas and the many ways the program presents data, across two states and many jurisdictions. For the 2025–2035 plan, we extended it into a project style guide with templates for print and web, an information architecture for the CCMP website, and a style guide for interaction and page templates. Together these keep the plan's many parts consistent and let HEP add to it over the coming decade. The same system is now used across many of HEP's data and mapping materials beyond the CCMP.