What is Telecoupling?

Telecoupling is a new avenue of research to understand today’s hyper-connected world and achieve a sustainable future. Telecoupling enables natural and social scientists across various disciplines to understand and generate information for managing how humans and nature sustainably coexist.

The telecoupling framework gains its distinction by enabling researchers and practitioners to dive deeply into systemic complexities, even if systems are far from each other. To understand the forces affecting sustainability across local to global scales, it is essential to build a comprehensive set of spatially explicit tools for describing and quantifying multiple reciprocal socioeconomic and environmental interactions over distances.

What is the Telecoupling Toolbox?

The Telecoupling Toolbox, designed at Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, is the first suite of geospatial software tools and apps developed to map and identify the five major interrelated components of the telecoupling framework: systems, flows, agents, causes, and effects. The modular design of the toolbox allows the integration of existing tools and software to assess synergies and tradeoffs associated with policies and other local-to-global interventions.

Who should use the Telecoupling Toolbox?

The innovative, free and open-source (see LICENSE for details) toolbox can provide researchers and practitioners a useful platform to address globally important issues, such as land use and land cover change, species invasion, migration, flows of ecosystem services, and trade of goods and products.

What's in the Toolbox?

ArcGIS Toolbox

The ArcGIS Toolbox is a large collection of mapping and analysis tools for use within ESRI's ArcGIS Desktop (version 10.3.1 or later) to systematically study telecoupling. Test the current version of the ArcGIS Toolbox by using your own data or by downloading our sample data. Look inside the ArcGIS Toolbox project folder for code, images, documentation, and detailed instructions on installation and use.

GeoApp

The GeoApp offers a dynamic, interactive, online geo-enabled platform along with a large collection of mapping and analysis tools to systematically study telecoupling. Check out and test our brand new GeoApp (beta) by using your own data or by downloading our sample data. Help yourself with our introductory tutorial if you need more time to familiarize yourself with the app widgets and tools. Look inside the GeoApp project folder for source code and images linked to the GeoApp.

Sample Data

ArcGIS Toolbox Data

Download and unzip our sample data folder for use with both our ArcGIS Toolbox and GeoApp. This data repository contains all the tables and spatial data necessary to run the set of telecoupling mapping and analysis tools we developed. For further information on any of the dataset provided, please feel free to contact us.

GeoApp Data

Credits and Contacts

Nan Jia: jianan2@msu.edu

Paul McCord: mccordpa@msu.edu

Jianguo 'Jack' Liu: liuji@msu.edu

LICENSE

Telecoupling Toolbox (“Software”) is the property of Michigan State University (MSU) and is made available solely for educational or non-commercial use. See LICENSE for details.

This toolbox depends on the R Statistical Computing Software:

This toolbox depends on ESRI software:

This toolbox depends on InVEST - Natural Capital Project software:

MSU-CSIS / telecoupling-toolbox

readme