Public Distribution

With the retirement of the GeoMAC website for data hosting and public data distribution in 2019, another method of delivering incident geospatial information to the public was needed. The Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Service (WFIGS) Group provides authoritative geospatial data products under the interagency Wildland Fire Data Program. Hosted in the NIFC Org, WFIGS provides both internal and public-facing data, accessible in a variety of formats. The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) “Open Data” site creates a publicly accessible, searchable website. Open Data sites make authoritative data easy to find and access in multiple commonly used formats. Making perimeters that have been approved for sharing with the public accessible through the NIFC Open Data site has a number of key benefits:

• Users can access the data in their preferred format – shapefile, geodatabase, spreadsheet, or several flavors of web service.
• Perimeter data can be shared from the same site as other wildland fire reference data, including dispatch boundaries, Geographic Area boundaries, and predictive service areas.
• Open Data sites are cloud-hosted and scale to the load put on them, depending on traffic, reducing the cost, and management workload of providing public-facing data.

The NIFC Open Data site URL is http://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/ and requires no login or password.

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Datasets

Several data sets are publicly available through the NIFC Open Data Site. Details can be found in the description of each service on the site.

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As a GISS you could be asked to use current and/or historic wildland fire data for analysis or maps.  To help understand and use WFIGS data, watch the WFIGS training video.