Rapid Response Geodatabase Demonstration

Project details
Spurred by a Joint Fire Sciences Program (JFSP) call for proposals to obtain information or data during or following wildland fire incidents or post-fire land treatments (known as Rapid Response projects), the US Forest Service's Fire Sciences Laboratory and the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis worked together to design a demonstration geodatabase combining several of these research results. The Rapid Response geodatabase gathers the spatial and tabular data of seven different teams into one centralized database, accessible to all the researchers for further data analysis.

During phase I of the project, staff at NCLFA worked with the Rapid Response project investigators, their staff, and consultants from ESRI to design, develop and implement an enterprise geodatabase based on ESRI's ArcSDE technology. NCLFA designed a database initially populated with data from the 2003 Cooney Ridge (Montana) fire. That database, powered by ESRI's ArcSDE and Microsoft's SQL Server, was hosted on NCLFA's local computer servers. Phase II of the project was implemented to ensure universal access to the geodatabase. After working with each research team, NCLFA staff created a web-based data entry module for the Primary Investigators and a data viewing module for the researchers and the public through which they could view and retrieve both spatial and tabular data. In addition, a desktop application was developed with data entry modules for four of the seven participating research teams.

The project has been fully completed and reported to the JFSP. The Rapid Response Geodatabase and associated web applications are currently functioning as working demonstrations of the capacity provided by a shared database. Several researchers are actively conducting research utilizing the data from this database. Through the implementation of the web-based data viewing module, the Rapid Response geodatabase demonstration project is accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Project development
Fire research data is categorically kept in disparate locations and in varying forms that makes it difficult for researchers to collaborate. The implementation of the RR GDB demonstrated that, although there are costs for implementing a centralized database (time, effort, specialized knowledge), researchers are empowered to communicate and collaborate more effectively.  The development lifecycle of this project demonstrates this increased collaboration: the NCLFA effectively leveraged Colin Hardy's research project and budget by supplying technical expertise and development time which came at a cost to both Hardy's project and the NCLFA; however the project strengthened the relationship between the Fire Lab and the NCLFA and provided multiple avenues for collaboration from the design of the geodatabase, to the data collection efforts, to the population and utilization of the geodatabase. Ultimately, fire researchers should consider the implementation of centralized databases in the future in order to draw important connections between their research efforts and further the state of the science.
http://webapps.firecenter.umt.edu/RapidResponse
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Rapid Response Geodatabase PowerPoint presentation (pdf)

Principal Investigators: Lee Macholz, Don Helmbrecht
Partners: USFS Fire Sciences Laboratory, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Idaho