Summary

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Fire and Aviation Management Information Management (FAM-IM) Branch is embarking 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. 

Problem and Solution

Now, the EGP program, with guidance from the Dingell Act among others, wants to move 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 will support FAM-IM 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 O&M tasks to ensure operations during peak wildland fire seasonal activities. Thereafter, the first year focuses on the discovery, definition, and determination of the next generation’s scope of services and solutions.  

The team will leverage a mix of cloud-based ESRI and possibly FOSS4G geospatial solutions that can support the federated wildland fire geospatial community. In doing so, the team embarked on collaborative stakeholder engagement efforts to discover the near-, mid-, and long-term focuses while establishing an agile roadmap and backlog. This includes lab testing and designing EGP-NG’s overall architecture to meet performance requirements via various approaches in mobile, web, and services technologies while uncovering the specific data needs and solutions (including ETL, ELT, lakes, cloud stores, and data integration). These solutions will improve performance, stability, and security 

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.