Description: Forest fires constitute a very serious environmental and economic problem in Poland. Almost 70% of the total forest area are pine woods, particularly vulnerable to fire. Prevention is the best way to avoid losses caused by forest fires, however, if fire has already started, only an instant reaction of forestry and fire services can prevent the area at risk of fire spread.
Problem: Both the State Forests, and the State Fire Service use different information systems supporting their activities. Such systems include GIS components and enable to visualize data on a map. However, they are not interconnected. The only tool which has been used so far is a regular export of the fire map from the Forest Numerical Map for the purpose of fire services. This allowed to view forest maps using Desktop GIS software, but it was of limited use during actual fire fighting operations and to users who did not have sufficient knowledge of GIS.
Solution: GIS Support has developed a WebGIS application which is to facilitate the exchange of geospatial data related to forest fire protection between the headquarters of the State Fire Service, the Regional Directorate of State Forests and forest inspectorates. The application allows to view any geospatial data collected in one database, and real-time communication between all users of the system in the event of an emergency. Key characteristics of the system:
- independent operation – i.e. it does not depend on the Internet. The application is operated within an internal network without the need to communicate with any external services.
- redundancy – in the event of any server failure, its functions are taken over by the second independent server. Once the server has been recovered, data replication takes places, making both databases consistent.
- real-time operation – the information about reported fires, acceptance of incident reports, and changes of the status is transferred immediately with no need to reload or refresh the system.
- intuitive user interface – there is no need to provide users-dispatchers with any complicated training to implement the system.