EsriUC User Presentations Awe and Impress
Water, air, earth, and fire—the four elements that constitute the Earth and the four focal points of user presentations at the 2015 Esri User Conference.
Esri’s Lauren Bennett and John Calkins led roughly 15,000 attendees on a journey from the cornfields of Midwestern America all the way to the Australian wilderness during the plenary session July 20. The purpose was to show how comprehensive and innovative GIS solutions can foster better understanding and bring about more informed decisions and actions.
- More than 15,000 Esri users attended the EsriUC Plenary in San Diego, California, listening raptly to a day's worth of presentations from organizations around the world.
The excursion began with a team from the Southwest Florida Water Management District (SWFWMD) demonstrating how it revamped its GIS infrastructure to open it up to more uses and users. Although SWFWMD had been using GIS to balance agriculture, development, and the environment for 30 years, the agency saw that it needed to do more to support Florida’s water needs. So, as SWFWMD bureau chief Steve Dicks explained, the agency implemented Web GIS to streamline workflows and bring together industry, agriculture, environmental organizations, and Florida residents.
- Kris A. Kaufman, Leigh Vershowske, and Steven Dicks, PhD, GISP take the main plenary stage to discuss how GIS helps to improve water quality throughout the Southwest Florida Water Management District.
Dicks demonstrated how Web GIS helps manage a range of water issues, from keeping Florida’s strawberries growing in the winter to analyzing how new housing developments need to be planned to avoid flood zones. SWFWMD GIS database and server analyst Leigh Vershowske then showed the audience the agency’s “most important map,” as he put it: an online form that makes it easy to apply for well, water use, and construction permits to plan future water development. To wrap it up, SWFWMD senior environmental scientist Kris Kaufman illustrated how the district used GIS to clean up a very polluted Tampa Bay and bring back ecologically vital seagrass in record numbers.
From Florida’s warm waters, the audience traveled northwest to Atlanta’s bustling Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which, according to Esri founder Jack Dangermond, “is really taking geography into a different dimension.”
Managing 250,000 passengers per day, 200 aircraft gates, five runways, 115 taxiways, 16,000 slabs of concrete, and more than 18,000 airfield lights requires a robust enterprise GIS solution. GIS manager David Wright and GIS analyst Anthony Vazquez took the audience on a tour of how the airport uses ArcGIS Online and a handful of mobile ArcGIS apps to inspect and maintain runways, taxiways, green space, street lights, and much more. The duo also demonstrated how ArcGIS Pro’s 3D capabilities helped them determine which trees were growing tall enough to penetrate airspace near the runway so the airport could ensure that they stay trimmed to Federal Aviation Administration regulations.
- Modeling data in 3D with ArcGIS Pro helps the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport conform to Federal Aviation Administration regulations.
Then it was off to another Atlanta—in the state of Indiana—to see how Beck’s Hybrids, a seed and technology company, uses GIS for precision agriculture and business needs.
As presenter Craig Rogers made evident, farmers do geodesign every day. Rogers demonstrated Beck’s Hybrids’ FARMserver, a map-enabled web application that helps farmers maximize their yield and keep costs low. Using maps, spatial analysis, and big data from live sensors and farm equipment, software users can monitor data such as soil composition and weather to ensure that their Beck’s Hybrids corn and soybean seeds thrive.
More recently, the company rolled GIS out to its marketing, sales, and leadership teams. Beck’s Hybrids’ GIS director Brooke Gajownik showed the audience how the company, which sells its seeds all over the Midwest, uses GIS to do detailed analyses of customer issues to cut down the time between incident and action. She also revealed how a suite of ArcGIS tools, including Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS and Explorer for ArcGIS, is helping Beck’s Hybrids identify—in very visually appealing ways—opportunities for business growth by conducting spatial and temporal analyses of sales and competition trends.
- Hot spot analysis helps Becks Hybrids visualize seed sales.
From earth to fire, the audience headed down under to the state of Victoria, Australia, to learn about Black Saturday, a day in February 2009 when more than 400 wildfires raged. As Anthony Griffiths of Victoria’s Department of Environment, Land, Water, and Planning said, fire is not always destructive; it can renew and rejuvenate—which is exactly what the Black Saturday fires did for the department’s mapping and firefighting capabilities.
The State of Victoria realized that it needed to be ready for the next wildfires before they happened, so agencies across the state worked together to create eMap, a system centered around cross-departmental collaboration and awareness. Using one map, built on a common database and accessible on any device, the State of Victoria is now able to proactively respond to and manage wildfires using predictive technology.
To demonstrate how the application works, the department’s eMap architect, Anthony Burgon, showed the audience all the fires going on in the State of Victoria at that very moment, as well as where weather changes were occurring. Using near-real time imagery and a fire modeling and prediction system called Phoenix Rapid Fire, responders and incident commanders from various agencies can predict where a fire might go and forecast potential impact zones.
Getting ahead of the game like this—via a GIS-enabled system of engagement—improves safety and situational awareness all around. And, even though the fire count in the State of Victoria is up this year, there hasn’t been nearly as much devastation. “More fire, less impact,” said Griffiths, driving home the point.
- The Black Saturday bush fires that burned across Victoria, Australia on February 7, 2009 are thought to be Australia's worst bush fire catastrophe. Up to 400 singular fires were recorded and 173 people lost their lives.
Openness, continuity, collaboration, and engagement: Those four themes unified the stories told during the plenary session user presentations—in much the same way that the four elements of the Earth coalesce. And, no doubt, they will unify the stories we hear from users throughout the week at the 2015 Esri User Conference.