Montana Wildland Fire Base Map
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http://webapps.firecenter.umt.edu/FCBaseMap
Project details
On a typical wildland fire, the GIS Specialist spends several days acquiring data and re-formatting maps of the area in order to generate the appropriate fire maps. The Montana Wildland Fire Base Map project, developed by the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis, allows the GIS Specialist to generate a base map in minutes, freeing them to focus on the creation, display and analysis of incident data.
The NCLFA’s Base Map takes care of the data mining, data generalization and representation, graphic refinement, and map compilation. The GIS Specialist can use a geodatabase populated with GIS data for the defined area of interest, a map template, and layer files that are already generalized, symbolized, and labeled to replicate a standard topographic base map. These layers are used in the production of cartographic products such as vicinity, briefing, and Incident Action Plan (IAP) maps, and to provide context for GIS workflows such as perimeter interpretation and editing. The data and maps downloaded through the Base Map are standardized for fire management GIS functions.
Base map data include transportation, administrative, stewardship, hydrography, hypsography and reference. The sources for this base data include Montana and national framework datasets; and demonstrates the utility of framework datasets in Montana. The state leads the nation in creating and maintaining comprehensive, centralized datasets; the Montana Wildland Fire Base Map is currently one of only a few applications demonstrating the use of these datasets. With this centralized data, data updates and changes are immediately made, so the data is always accurate and current.
Project development
The NCLFA’s GIS team developed the Montana Wildland Fire Base Map after working as GIS technicians on wildland fire assignments and realizing that fire base maps were time-consuming to create. NCLFA partnered with the Montana State Library Natural Resource Information System to acquire Montana datasets, then standardized and formatted all of that data and developed a web-based mapping application through which the data and associated products can be queried and downloaded. After user testing by wildland fire GIS experts, NCLFA refined the database and mapping application to provide more detail and functionality to the online map.
The NCLFA recently partnered with USGS Geographic Names Information System to do a prototype update of the GNIS and Base Map (GNIS is the Federal standard for geographic nomenclature and contains information about physical and cultural geographic features of all types in the United States, but is not linked or cross-referenced to regional datasets). In coordination with GIS users across Montana, the NCLFA designed a framework for integrating the GNIS data with all other Montana GIS datasets. This linkage will prevent data duplication, will give GIS users access to accurate names, and will localize the GNIS database with Montana information. GNIS names are integrated with Montana datasets so that users can perform text-based geographic queries within Base Map.
The Base Map application is available to the fire community.
http://webapps.firecenter.umt.edu/FCBaseMap
Principal Investigator: Lee Macholz
Project Staff: Craig Comstock, LiMei Piao
Project Partners: Mike Sweet,
UM College of Forestry and Conservation
Montana State Library’s
Natural Resource Information System (NRIS)
Base Map Workshop PowerPoint presentation (pdf)
