Whether siting alternative-fuel stations to support a fleet’s transition away from petroleum, prioritizing maintenance of a network of county roads, planning search areas for a search-and-rescue mission or optimizing fire-department staffing and responses, mapping enables better decisions.
Working in local government since 2001, I have grown to see the power of geospatial intelligence and how a lack of GIS capability can hamper planning in a variety of fields. For most of those years, I have also volunteered and worked part-time in various emergency-management and public-safety roles, observing that accurate, timely, accessible GIS analysis is essential to performance of emergency work.
I believe GIS usage should be widely distributed at the desktop and mobile level far beyond the specialist community. I’m learning how best to deploy GIS daily in my professional and volunteer roles to the betterment of the agencies with which I work.
