Know Your Landscape (KYL) Enhancements: Strengthening Landscape Intelligence for Better Planning
September 2026
Natural Resource Management (NRM) planning increasingly requires more than understanding individual resources in isolation. Water availability is connected to rainfall, groundwater, terrain and cropping patterns; vegetation changes are linked to land use and ecological conditions; and environmental stress often intersects with the socio-economic realities of communities.
The Know Your Landscape (KYL) dashboard has been evolving to help practitioners examine these connections. The latest enhancements strengthen KYL as a platform for landscape diagnosis, spatial analysis and planning, bringing together new datasets, improved reports and stronger connections between landscape intelligence and field-level planning.
Explore the Know Your Landscape dashboard
Moving beyond individual indicators
A single dataset rarely explains a landscape condition.
For example, declining water availability may be associated with rainfall variability, groundwater extraction, cropping intensity and limited surface-water availability. Looking at these indicators together can provide a more useful picture of where pressures are concentrated and what may require further investigation.
KYL is therefore increasingly designed to help users move from individual indicators to patterns of landscape stress.
The platform now includes additional filters covering soil health, soil type and shrubland changes, alongside new socio-economic datasets such as Mission Antyodaya and Facilities data. These additions allow users to examine ecological and socio-economic conditions together, including indicators related to access to services such as health and banking facilities. Refer here for new features on KYL
The objective is not to produce an automatic diagnosis, but to provide a stronger evidence base for asking the right planning questions.
Strengthening the Micro-Watershed view
The Micro-Watershed (MWS) provides an important spatial unit for understanding how water, terrain and land use interact.
The enhanced MWS reports now include additional landscape information such as Digital Elevation Model (DEM), rivers, canals and drainage density. The reports have also been improved with grid maps for different datasets and better overall readability, making it easier to interpret the information presented.
A new multi-MWS selection feature allows users to select multiple micro-watersheds within the dashboard. This supports comparison and analysis across more than one MWS and is particularly useful when examining connected landscape units.
The MWS reports also now include fortnightly NDVI time-series information for tree and cropping areas. By showing vegetation conditions over time, this provides an additional basis for understanding landscape change rather than relying only on a snapshot.
Bringing village-level information into the landscape
Landscape-level information becomes more meaningful when it can be connected to the villages within it.
The Village Report is now live on the KYL dashboard, using Mission Antyodaya data to provide key village-level insights. This brings socio-economic and service-related information into the same broader landscape context used for ecological and hydrological analysis.
The report provides a more structured way to examine village conditions and understand how they relate to the wider landscape. View a sample Village Report
Understanding waterbodies within the landscape
Waterbodies are an important part of understanding local water systems and their relationship with surrounding landscape characteristics.
KYL now supports the selection of waterbodies, alongside selected MWS and village boundaries, and to download these selections to open them in QGIS, Excel, etc. This makes spatial information from the dashboard more usable for further analysis and planning outside the platform.
The ability to work across these spatial units helps users examine landscape information at different levels rather than treating administrative or natural-resource boundaries separately. View sample waterbody report
Connecting landscape intelligence with planning on the ground
One of the important developments in KYL is its growing connection with Commons Connect, the CoRE Stack participatory planning application.
Users can now view the planning being undertaken in a tehsil through Commons Connect, creating a link between landscape-level information and planning processes taking place on the ground.
This connection is important because geospatial data can indicate patterns and areas that warrant attention, while community and field processes provide information about local priorities, resource conditions and proposed interventions. Refer to stories from ground on common connect usage.
KYL and Commons Connect therefore serve complementary functions:
KYL helps understand landscape conditions and patterns. Commons Connect helps connect that understanding with participatory planning on the ground.
A new Stewards tab also provides a dedicated view of steward information, helping bring greater visibility to the people involved in these field processes.
Also refer to India Landscape Stewardship Network
From landscape information to planning questions
The purpose of these enhancements is not to replace field knowledge or prescribe solutions from data alone.
Instead, KYL can help practitioners move through a more structured process:
Data → Indicators → Patterns → Diagnosis → Prioritisation → Planning
For example, a combination of negative water balance, groundwater stress and high cropping intensity may indicate an area requiring closer investigation. Similarly, vegetation change can be examined alongside terrain, land use and other landscape characteristics to understand what may be driving the observed pattern.
The next step still requires field validation, community knowledge and technical assessment.
This distinction is central to the way KYL is intended to support planning:
KYL provides evidence for diagnosis; it does not replace field assessment, community knowledge or technical design.
Making landscape intelligence more actionable
The latest enhancements bring together several levels of landscape understanding:
● Landscape-level indicators to identify broader patterns;
● Micro-watershed analysis to understand water, terrain and connected ecological processes;
● Village Reports to examine socio-economic and service-related conditions;
● Waterbody information to strengthen local water-resource analysis;
● Temporal indicators to understand change over time; and
● Commons Connect integration to connect landscape evidence with planning on the ground.
Together, these capabilities make KYL more useful not simply as a repository of datasets, but as a platform for exploring relationships, identifying areas for deeper investigation and supporting evidence-informed planning.
Looking ahead
The continued development of KYL reflects the broader CoRE Stack approach of connecting research, technology and field practice. As new datasets and analytical methods become available, and as practitioners use the platform in different planning contexts, KYL can continue to evolve.
The direction is clear: from simply asking “What data is available?” to asking “What does the data tell us about the landscape, what patterns can we identify, and what should we investigate on the ground?”
The CoRE insights prototype is a step in this direction [blog].
Ultimately, the value of KYL lies not in the number of datasets it contains, but in how effectively those datasets help practitioners understand landscapes, identify priorities and make better-informed decisions about natural resources.
From landscape data to landscape understanding—and from landscape understanding to better planning.