See who and what is at risk - before the next flood.
CHARM Online Studio is a geospatial planning tool built for communities, planners, and agencies. Map flood hazards, overlay vulnerable populations, and identify what's at stake - then bring your whole team to the table. Invite collaborators, share projects, and workshop priorities together - without needing geographic information system (GIS) expertise.
CHARM Online Studio is a no-code flood risk intelligence platform built by Texas A&M AgriLife, funded by the Texas General Land Office, and purpose-built for the planners, extension agents, and county officials who protect Texas coastal communities. It surfaces critical data in seconds - and gives your team a shared space to explore, discuss, and act on what they find. No GIS expertise needed.
Why It Matters
Texas coastal communities face increasing flood risk, and effective planning depends on having reliable information.
CHARM helps planners, local governments, and community leaders better understand flood exposure, evaluate future development scenarios, and make more informed resilience decisions using trusted data and interactive mapping tools.
How It Works
Three steps from data to decision.
No GIS degree. No data wrangling. Just your community's risk, clearly mapped and ready to collaborate with other community stakeholders.
Set up your project and invite your team
Define your community boundary - county, city, or custom area. CHARM loads your region's data automatically. Name your project, invite collaborators by email, and assign roles so the right people have access from day one. Participants can join your shared workspace, explore the map alongside you, and contribute ideas and comments - all without a GIS background. Get started in minutes.
Layer your hazards and risks
Turn on flood zones, hurricane surge scenarios, and risk levels. Add population vulnerability, critical facilities, and buildings to see exactly who and what is exposed.
Explore the numbers, export the findings
The Stats panel calculates automatically as you build your map. See counts of homes, residents, and facilities at risk - then export for reports, grant applications, or community meetings.
See It In Action
Watch CHARM work on a real community.
A walkthrough of the core workflow - project setup, layer selection, and stats.
What You Can Do
The tools your community needs to plan and act.
Flood zone & hurricane surge mapping
Who's at risk – population & social vulnerability
What's at risk – buildings & critical facilities
Exportable stats for reports & grants
Multiple map views, one project
Built on trusted national datasets
Collaborative workshopping - plan together, not in silos
- Invite participants - share a project with colleagues, agency partners, or community representatives by email. Everyone works from the same live map.
- Comments - leave notes on specific map areas, hazard layers, or risk findings so team members can respond and discuss without leaving the platform.
- Focus area exploration - collaborators can define and explore their own areas of interest within the shared project, highlighting neighborhoods or corridors that matter most to them.
- Tagging - organize observations, priorities, and discussion threads with tags so findings are easy to sort and revisit across sessions.
- Idea sharing - capture participant input - concerns, local knowledge, mitigation ideas - directly within the project workspace, turning a map view into a living planning document.
Who It's For
Designed around how Texas planners actually work.
Plan and respond with federally-sourced flood data.
Whether you're updating a hazard mitigation plan, responding to a resident's flood concern, or preparing for a council meeting - CHARM gives you federally-sourced flood risk data without needing a GIS department. Invite department heads or agency partners into your project, assign focus areas, and use comments and tags to coordinate input before a single meeting is scheduled. Set up a project in minutes, not months.
Support resilience planning with consistent, mapped data.
CHARM is designed to support facilitated resilience planning. As an extension agent or regional coordinator, you can set up a project for each community you work with, invite local stakeholders as collaborators, and run participatory workshops where participants explore flood scenarios, tag priorities, and share ideas directly on the map - all grounded in real data about their own neighborhoods.
Consistent data, community by community.
CHARM uses standardized national datasets so findings are comparable across communities and defensible for program decisions. Invite colleagues, share projects, and build a regional picture that supports grant programs, hazard mitigation planning, and policy decisions. Comment threads and tagging make it easy to coordinate across agencies without losing track of who said what.
Built Around Community Needs
How communities use CHARM to plan.
CHARM is built around the real workflows of Texas planners, emergency managers, and extension agents - not a generic GIS tool.
Hazard Mitigation Planning
County emergency managers use CHARM to map flood exposure across their jurisdiction, identify vulnerable populations, and document project priorities for their Local Hazard Mitigation Plan (LHMP).
Community Resilience Workshops
Extension agents and facilitators use CHARM to run participatory planning sessions - online or in person - where community members can see their neighborhood on the map, explore flood scenarios, and identify local priorities together. Participants can be invited directly into the project, leave comments on specific areas, tag concerns, and share ideas in real time, turning the platform into an interactive workshop space that keeps producing value after the meeting ends.
Grant Applications and Reporting
Communities pursuing FEMA BRIC/HMGP funding or CRS inclusion use CHARM to generate exposure statistics and project documentation to support grant applications - in plain-language formats suitable for planning reports.
About This Program
Funded to serve Texas coastal communities, designed by real-life community resiliency planning.
CHARM Online Studio is developed by the Community Hazards and Resource Management (CHARM) Program within the Disaster Assessment and Recovery (DAR) Unit at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. Program operations are managed by the DAR Mitigation Office, which supports communities with planning tools, data, and decision-support resources that strengthen resilience to natural hazards.
This program is funded and supported by the Texas General Land Office (GLO), using U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery and/or Mitigation funds.
CHARM Online is free to use for qualifying Texas communities because it is publicly funded to serve a public need: helping communities understand and reduce their flood risk before the next storm.
A county planner in Matagorda or a resilience officer in Harris County can open a project, view flood zones under BLE advisory and FIRM regulatory scenarios, overlay SLOSH surge for a Cat 3 hurricane, explore who lives and works in affected areas, invite agency partners and community members to the same shared workspace - and use that collaborative map as the working surface for their plan.
Funded by
The Texas General Land Office (GLO) provided guidance, oversight, and funding for this study.
Disaster Recovery & Mitigation (CDBG-DR/MIT)
Developed and administered by
Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service
Disaster Assessment and Recovery (DAR) Unit
CDBG-MIT
Coast TX
Developed by & in partnership with
Program Access
Ready to map flood risk - and plan with your whole community?
CHARM Online Studio is free for qualifying Texas communities, county planners, extension agents, and planning agencies. Create an account, set up a project, and invite your team to get started - no GIS expertise required.
Beta launching July 2026. CHARM Online Studio is a product of Texas A&M AgriLife Extension.
Frequently Asked Questions