About
Founder and Review Network
Canopulse is an independent climate-priority platform built to make tract-level screening inspectable, source-grounded, and exportable.
Ronak Macwan
Founder, Canopulse
Ronak Macwan built Canopulse to close a recurring gap in urban climate work: teams could see heat and canopy layers, but struggled to turn them into tract-level explanations that planners, grant writers, and council staff could inspect and defend.
The platform combines environmental-science training, geospatial analysis, and a publicly released Urban Canopy Risk Index model into a single screening workflow. Every score traces to named public datasets, carries a confidence label, and exports into reports built for real planning decisions.
Method origin
Why UCRI was created
Urban climate teams often work across separate canopy, heat, built-surface, vulnerability, and environmental-burden layers. UCRI was created to preserve those drivers while adding one transparent tract-level screening signal for comparison and reporting.
The method developed into one statewide California UCRI release with statewide percentiles, EBS, 58-county geometry, city/place assignments, explicit provisional records, and versioned report outputs. The July 2026 release uses CalEnviroScreen 5.0 Pollution Burden for environmental burden.
The product remains independent. Its value comes from inspectability, reproducibility, and workflow quality, not from implying endorsement by a university, agency, funder, or government body.
Review network
Canopulse is an independent research-to-product initiative. Institutional affiliations are listed for identification only and do not imply endorsement by any university, agency, or organization unless explicitly stated.
External methodology review
In progress
Named reviewers
Published only with permission
Pilot users
By request
What is under review
Review is focused on the model record, the product workflow, and whether the outputs support careful screening work without overstating what the data can decide.
Model record
Formula reproduction, source vintages, CES 5.0 provenance, component definitions, ranks, and missing-data treatment.
Product workflow
County and tract navigation, comparison logic, Reviewer Mode, report clarity, accessibility, and export traceability.
Practical usefulness
Whether the screening context helps planners, GIS analysts, researchers, consultants, nonprofits, and grant teams organize closer review.
Canopulse is seeking planners, GIS analysts, urban-forestry practitioners, environmental researchers, and quantitative-method reviewers who can test the model record, interface, and reporting workflow. Feedback is not presented as endorsement.
Contact
For pilots, custom geographies, methodology reviews, or institutional partnerships, start with a scoped request.