The Southwestern Water Conservation District celebrated a $25.6 million grant from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to address the impacts of drought on aquatic habitats in the Colorado River Basin.

The funding, the result of a broad public-private partnership, was hard-earned.

It also may be short-lived and would be a serious setback for our region.

On Monday, via a sweeping executive order titled “Unleashing American Energy,” President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to halt funding associated with the Inflation Reduction Act, the source of the Bureau of Recreation award.

Anna Riling is a geologist-turned-cartographer who owns Four Corners Mapping, based in Durango, Colorado. Her business creates custom cartography for policy advocacy campaigns and print media, designs interactive web mapping applications and ArcGIS Story Maps stories, and produces geologic and topographic trail maps. In this interview, Riling talks about her move to mapmaking, her work updating the Multimodal Transportation Plan for Durango, and the power of maps in influencing decisions that matter.

Esri ArcUser, Fall 2024

Four Corners Mapping’s StoryMap, “Caught in the Middle: A River Between Two Dams and the Future of the Grand Canyon”, was selected by the Esri StoryMaps team as one of ten favorites of 2023. From the blog: ”How does one choose story favorites from the hundreds of thousands of ArcGIS StoryMaps stories created in 2023? For every story on our list of favorites, there are hundreds of other deserving narratives. We’ve selected ten team and community stories that leverage product features and exemplify storytelling best practices.”

Meet Anna Riling and Sinjin Eberle, co-authors of Caught in the Middle and finalists in the 2023 ArcGIS StoryMaps Competition.

Anna, the owner of Four Corners Mapping and GIS, creates maps and place-based stories to advocate for meaningful environmental causes and protection of the natural world. Sinjin is the Southwest Communications Director with American Rivers and Executive Producer of American Rivers Media. As a child of the Southwest, Sinjin has spent the vast majority of his life in Southwestern landscapes and advocating for the protection of both land and water across the Southwest. Anna and Sinjin share a deep connection to the wildlands of the Colorado River Basin. 

Learn how they — along with co-authors at AMP Insights and the Environmental Defense Fund — collaborated with scientists, Tribal leaders, historical experts, and agency officials to create a previously untold narrative around the increasing water risks to the Grand Canyon and Colorado River Basin.

Esri StoryScape, February 1, 2024

Durango Herald, January 27, 2022