Wildfires may look familiar on the ground, but the information environment around every incident has changed beyond recognition. Crews still dig hand lines and use burnout operations, yet today every tactic, resource order and evacuation decision depends on geospatial data that must move faster than the fire itself. The National Interagency Fire Center’s (NIFC’s) ArcGIS Online organization (NIFC org) sits at the center of that new paradigm. It uses ArcGIS as an enterprise data system to deliver a national tactical operating picture built on the principle that standards are the only way to make speed, trust and interoperability real in public safety operations. For chiefs, city and county leaders and Incident Management Team (IMT) members, NIFC provides a roadmap for how to turn geospatial chaos into a durable, shared operating picture for your own mission.
Fragmented Maps Migrate Into A Digital National Service
Walker Henry is a GIS Project Manager contracted to the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, where he leads the Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services (WFIGS) group and is an administrator for the National Interagency Fire Center organization with more than 30,000 users. He recalled that in his early assignments in volunteer technical rescue and 911 address mapping, wildfire information was fragmented and slow. Data came from many sources, moved through disconnected systems and often stayed siloed at the incident. Access for regional and national decision makers lagged behind the pace of operations.
That model has now been replaced by a national, cloud first architecture that treats incident data as a shared asset. The National Incident Feature Service, or NIFS, a hosted feature service in the NIFC ArcGIS Online organization, forms the core of that architecture. Instead of hundreds of file geodatabases scattered across the country, the NIFS keeps the data in one place and exposes it through hosted views designed for different missions and user groups. “The NIFS realizes the event data standard at scale,” Henry explained. “The NIFS both sets and enforces the standard just through its existence.”
For operations and GIS teams, this means incident data no longer lives and dies with a single fire. For leadership, it means consistent, near real-time situational awareness across a region or the whole country without building a bespoke system for every jurisdiction. The incident map is no longer just a product. “The data itself has become the product,” Henry said.
The Event Data Standard: One Language For Many Agencies
The engine behind this capability is not a clever web app, but a disciplined commitment to standards. For decades, the wildland fire community has relied on the National Wildfire Coordinating Group to set common practices across agencies and jurisdictions. Interagency committees and subject matter experts maintain standards so incident management teams can plug into local, state and federal systems without reinventing data models on every deployment.
In 2016 those efforts produced the Event Data Standard, the official schema for wildfire incident operations data. At its core, three primary layers serve as a common language:
- Event point
- Event line
- Event polygon
These three layers cover nearly all operational features used on wildfire incidents, from drop points and staging areas to dozer lines and perimeters. The NIFS adds supporting layers for property tracking, heat detections and strategic planning to round out the operational picture.
On its own, a schema cannot move data. Inside the NIFC org, the Event Data Standard becomes operational because it is implemented as the backbone of one national service. Every feature collected through Field Maps, every perimeter edited by a GIS specialist and every update captured by archiving must align with that model. “Foundational to the NIFS is its data standard,” Henry said. “Centralizing information into authoritative services is critical because data silos slow coordination and limit decision making.”
For chiefs and public safety leaders, that discipline translates into real outcomes:
- It creates consistent meaning across incidents and agencies, so a perimeter or hand line means the same thing across the nation.
- It enables automatic aggregation and reporting because systems know exactly how to interpret each feature.
- It opens the door to interoperability with dispatch, reporting, analytics and public-facing tools without custom translation every time.
GISS: The Human Layer That Makes Standards Work
The NIFC architecture also proves a point many public safety agencies grapple with: technology only works when you invest in the human roles that make it work. In wildland fire, that role is the GIS Specialist, or GISS, a formal position in the incident command system. GISS personnel manage incident geospatial data and produce the maps and information products used by firefighters, planners and decision makers every operational period.
Becoming a GISS requires extensive training, a national-level course, a task book completed on active incidents and annual refreshers. Around 400 GISS remain consistently active nationwide. “GISS have always been responsible for ensuring that incident data is accurate, consistent and available when it matters most,” Henry noted. “What’s changed is the technology available to support that mission.”
Today, GISS’ operate almost entirely inside the NIFS. Radio reports still come in, some lines still start on paper, and GPS receivers still appear in the field, but the vast majority of operational data now flows through ArcGIS Field Maps into the standardized service. The official GISS workflow, grounded in NWCG standards for geospatial operations, gives them a structured process to maintain quality, enforce schema compliance and produce operational products.
For command staff, that workflow is a governance asset. It means every new map, dashboard or data feed is rooted in the same authoritative source and maintained by someone trained to protect its integrity. “Strong governance is what allows us to build complexity while maintaining consistency,” Henry said.
A Fire’s Data Journey: From First Report To Certified Record
The impact of this standards-driven approach becomes clear when you trace a single incident from first report to long-term history. In most of the nation, a new wildfire begins life in IRWIN, the Integrated Reporting of Wildfire Information system, when dispatch enters the initial call. IRWIN assigns a geospatial point and a globally unique identifier known as the IRWIN ID.
To bring that record into the NIFS, the system automatically creates a triangle polygon that roughly matches the reported acreage. The triangle looks intentionally artificial on the map, a visual cue that it is a placeholder, but it carries the IRWIN ID that no one wants to key into a phone under pressure.
Once the first engine arrives, that standardized scaffold quickly fills with real operational data. Before fire season, many units build initial attack web maps that combine NIFS layers with local hazards, infrastructure and ownership data. When a call comes in, firefighters already have a common operating picture (COP) and can immediately begin collecting features.
Using Field Maps, they add staging areas, drop points and hand lines directly into the NIFS. As they walk the fire edge they stream line features that capture exactly where they have constructed the control line. Soon someone captures the first perimeter. It may be incomplete or approximate, but in initial attack “an estimate is far more valuable than waiting for perfect information,” Henry said. Because that perimeter begins as the auto-generated triangle, crews only adjust the geometry and a few attributes for a single standardized record.
As soon as they submit the update, the new perimeter is visible to other responders, the home unit, regional leadership, analysts and connected systems, all tied to the same IRWIN ID. That single identifier keeps incident information synchronized with public-facing applications and interagency systems without manual duplication.
If the fire grows, an incident management team arrives, including at least one GISS. There is no messy data handoff. The team steps into the same NIFS data set that initial attack crews started using on day one. Stewardship shifts to the incident GISS, who follows the NWCG workflow to maintain quality, create maps, dashboards and digital products and keep the COP aligned with field reality. Nearly every major wildfire in the United States now uses the NIFS in this way, and Henry’s goal is to extend that model to every fire.
Behind the scenes, NIFC runs archiving that captures every change to the data as a new feature every five minutes. That archive makes it possible to replay an incident’s evolution over time and support after-action reviews and training.
As suppression winds down, the same standardized data supports a different mission. Resource advisors, archaeologists and land managers use it to track suppression repair, document damage and guide recovery efforts across the landscape. On large incidents that work can continue long after the IMT demobilizes, yet the data stays in one system and one standard.
The final step is certification in INFORM, the Interagency Fire Occurrence Reporting Module. Only authorized personnel can certify an incident, making this the last quality control gate before the record is locked in. The perimeter maintained in the NIFS is available directly in the workflow, so teams do not have to rebuild geometry or attributes. Once certified, that perimeter becomes the official final fire perimeter and is published again to the WFIGS Fire History Services as the definitive record for that incident. “Years after the smoke is clear, the information collected throughout the life of the incident continues to provide value,” Henry said.
Building National History Automatically
For leadership, one of the most powerful outcomes of this architecture is what happens after the incident. Every perimeter maintained in the NIFS is automatically aggregated into WFIGS Fire History Services, with updates published within minutes.
In the past, building a national wildfire history required collecting data from individual incidents or aggregating agency datasets long after the fact. Now that history is built automatically as a byproduct of normal operations because everyone works in the same standard and the same services. “Today, that historical record is built automatically as incident personnel do their normal jobs,” Henry noted. The result is one of the most timely and complete collections of best-available wildfire perimeters ever assembled.
These services are publicly available through the NIFC open data site. Researchers analyze long-term fire trends. Journalists and public information officers communicate incident impacts. Public safety tools help communities understand wildfire activity in their area. Because everything comes from the same authoritative source, it strengthens trust in public communication and planning.
Governance, Access And Earning Adoption
The NIFC experience underscores a truth for every public safety agency trying to modernize its geospatial operations: governance is not optional. “Strong governance is what allows us to build complexity while maintaining consistency,” Henry said.
Several lessons stand out for other agencies:
- Separate working data from systems of record so operations can stay flexible while history remains clean.
- Centralize information into authoritative services because silos slow coordination and degrade decisions.
- Use hosted views, groups and role-based permissions so each user has what they need and only what they need.
“If capability exists, it will eventually be used,” Henry cautioned. That mindset has pushed NIFC to pair every new capability with clear standards, roles and training. As an interagency program, NIFC cannot simply mandate participation. “Participation has to be earned,” Henry said. “That’s why we focused on making our tools intuitive, useful, and directly relevant to the work our users do every day.” Every new user makes the dataset richer and the operational picture more complete.
The NIFC org is free to join for anyone working in wildfire in an official capacity, from federal employees to local volunteers. Membership includes access to the NIFS and other national services, ArcGIS Online capabilities, Field Maps, Survey123, help desk support and a growing set of resources. This spring, NIFC expanded location sharing to all users, making that capability available to more than 35,000 people and marking another major step forward in situational awareness.
A Playbook Public Safety Can Adapt
Henry’s vision of the future remains grounded in operations, “to leverage the power of ArcGIS Online to provide a centralized, accessible platform for the geospatial data, tools and analysis that support inter-agency wildland fire management.” That vision invokes a world where geospatial technology and data seamlessly integrate into everyday operations, “empowering stakeholders at every level with the information they need to make safer, faster and more informed decisions.”
For public safety agencies beyond wildland fire, the takeaways include:
- Define standards that match real operations.
- Implement them in centralized, service-based architectures.
- Invest in governance and specialist roles to steward the system.
- Focus on tools that are intuitive and directly relevant to line work so adoption spreads because they make everyone’s job easier.
In wildland fire, that approach has already turned scattered data into a living, national operating picture that follows an incident from first dispatch entry through recovery and into history. Henry noted, “That’s the future we’re working towards and we hope you’ll join us.”
This content was derived from a presentation at the Esri Safety and Security Summit 2026.