A suggested resource for situational awareness and monitoring of the High Park Fire near Fort Collins, Colorado

More on mapping the CO wildfire (aka HighParkFire)… there’s been much local attention, particularly via Twitter, paid to the webmap developed by Mapbiquity showing regular updates to the fire footprint (data via Geomac) along with other relevant data products (like shelter info etc…), however, there’s also another fabulous WMS sharing regular updates on the situation and the progress of the fire. The Colorado wildfire viewer developed by the DTSagile team (think Dave Bouwman and crew in Fort Collins, CO). This application comes from a previous project developed for monitoring wildfires in the State of Texas and is now hosted on a server and domain devoted to the Colorado High Park Fire – see http://co.dtswildfire.com.

The service, similar to the social news maps that Esri regularly pushes out, provides real time data and news feed but much more (think esri story map on steroids). You’ll be greeted by a home screen on the main page that shows the latest data of the fire footprint  and users can then enter to access much more info by clicking the “Wildfire Viewer” link at the top of the page – this calls up an impressive  Flex Viewer where a wealth of information can be found.

Looking around you’ll find the following information:

• news updates from Larimer County emergency info services
• Feeds from the InciWeb service
• locations of web cross emergency shelters
• Fire perimeter footprint
• Fire intense heat boundary
• Feeds from Twitter, youtube, and flickr showing geotagged social media posts of tweets, photos, and video
• A number of cartographic, drawing, and measurement tools are available for users along with the ability to generate bookmarks and printed output.

If you notice on the home page of the WMS at the bottom you’ll see tabs to  show a number of different themes including Intense heat access, wildfire threat, evacuation areas, surface fuels, and of interest, check out the Pine Beetle damage areas and how these coincide with the fire footprint obviously due to the fuel these areas feed the fire (See below).

Great job to Dave and the dtsagile team for their efforts – See http://co.dtswildfire.com

For more info about the fire see #highparkfire on Twitter

Related news and articles:

• Fort Collins Geo Tech Professionals Mapping High Park Wildfire
• USDA Forest Service and NASA release Web-based forest disturbance monitoring tool
• RiskMeter.com Adds Texas Wildfire Report to its Service 
• Webinar to Discuss Role of Geospatial Information Systems in Forest Fire Prevention
• Texas Wildfires Social News Map from Esri  

Other weblinks and resources:

• InciWeb Incident news updates on High Park Fire
  

• Coloradoan: High Park Fire maps and resources

• GISuser Emergency Response Articles
  

• Mapbiquity WMS http:// cohighparkfiremap.org/
• GeoCommons mashup http://geocommons.com/maps/176979
• USDA Forest Service and NASA release Web-based forest disturbance monitoring tool
• RiskMeter.com Adds Texas Wildfire Report to its Service
• Webinar to Discuss Role of Geospatial Information Systems in Forest Fire Prevention
• Texas Wildfires Social News Map from Esri
• Social Map Tip - Wildfire News Map Helps You Cover the 2011 Fire Season
• National Inter vAgency Fire Center http://www.nifc.gov/