Summary
The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Fire and Aviation Management Information Management (FAM-IM) Branch and NIFC embarked on an effort to modernize its mission-critical Enterprise Geospatial Portal (EGP) for the Next Generation (EGP-NG). Since its 2009 inception, EGP has offered a suite of web solutions, geospatial data services, and data ingestion designed to provide situational awareness of wildland fire fighting activities as well as aviation information management tools. EGP Next Generation now offers a modernized PaaS model for dozens of feeds, services, and applications to meet the growing demand of technology for the field, dispatch, planners, command with the most up-to-date authoritative wildland fire information available.
Problem and Solution
The EGP program, with guidance from the Dingell Act among others, needed to modernize to the next generation of web, applications, and services to improve overall incident and strategic management to bring data into the hands of the varied stakeholders – from ‘boots on the ground’ to coordination centers to data suppliers to various mission stakeholders. EGP-NG supports NIFC to address a range of Geographic Information System (GIS)/geospatial, data, and technology challenges to support resilient landscapes, strengthen fire-adapted communities, and facilitate a safe and effective WF response. The Scope will first manage existing . Thereafter, the first year focuses on the discovery, definition, and determination of the next generation’s scope of services and solutions.
The team leveraged a mix of cloud-based ESRI, cloud and AI geospatial solutions to support the federated wildland fire geospatial community. In doing so, the team executed:
- collaborative stakeholder engagement efforts to discover the near-, mid-, and long-term focuses while establishing an agile roadmap and backlog.
- Dynamic lab testing and designing EGP-NG’s overall architecture to achieve next generation solutions in mobile, cloud, rapid performance, ETL and service models, semantic data integration, AI, and application development frameworks
- Defined and developed enterprise solutions for ETL, ELT, lakes, cloud stores, data integration, data catalogs, application frameworks, and service delivery.
- O&M tasks to ensure operations during peak wildland fire seasonal activities
The solutions include dozen applications and 100s of near real-time services and feeds in situational awareness, aviation management.
Outcome and Benefit
The outcome of this 7-year engagement will be the development and operations of a sustainable ecosystem of actionable geospatial data that empowers users to create—and access in times of need—information while avoiding data proliferation and technical debt that increasingly strains FAM-IM’s resources. These EGP solutions improve performance, stability, and security. Technologies include ArcGIS, AGOL/Hub, Snowflake, MVC JS, AI, FME, GitHub, Jenkins DevOps, Cloud IaaS/PaaS, and AI accelerated Development. The new EGP WildFireSA went live in May 2025 in beta. Read more
