Silent Spring Institute

MassHEIS
Help Section

Getting Started

Welcome to MassHEIS, an interactive mapping tool that allows you to explore the health and environment of your community. This section of Help will get you started with the MassHEIS tool.

Watch a Tutorial!
These two videos observe a woman seeking information about her local area:

Breast cancer rates in her town	Where pesticides have been sprayed

Or Follow These Instructions

To begin using MassHEIS, you can look at maps that have been precreated with a particular theme, e.g. breast cancer or polluting facilities, or you can build your own map from a long list of environmental and health data.

1. From the MassHEIS home, look for the Get Started box in the upper left hand corner.

2. Using the drop-down menu, choose which kind of map you would look at and then select your town of interest. Click Make my Map! to proceed to the map.

NOTE: You must accept the user agreement before proceeding. Also, some pages will not display properly unless you turn off your pop-up blocker

3. You will now be on the Mapping page. To go back to the page you came from, you can click on the MassHEIS Home tab. NOTE: The Back button on your browser is disabled for this application.

4. The map you requested is in the center of the page and the list of displayed layers appears to the right. Click on the Legend tab to swap your view to legend, which displayes symbols for the selected data layers. To learn more about the data displayed in your map, click here.

5. Look at the buttons on the left. With these icons you can zoom in or out, save, print, or find out more information about the items displayed on the map. To learn more about using these tools, click here.

6. Now look at the tabs along the bottom entitled Your Health, Your Community, and Take Action. These tabs provide links to more information about your selected topic, and to ways you can take action to improve local health and the environment.

7. Once you have toured the map page, you may want to look more closely at the map you have developed. To learn more about interpreting the data, click here.

8. Congratulations! You have developed and analyzed a map of your area of interest! To create a new map, return to the MassHEIS home. For more assistance, please browse the other HELP topics.