US Forest Service Uses Jagwire for Better Active Fire Management

Problem:

Over the last several decades, wildland fire management has drastically changed with longer fire seasons, unprecedented fire behavior and larger fires that burn more acres each year. In the western United States in particular, wildfires have become an all-too-common occurrence that destroy personal property and wildlife habitat and cause extreme air pollution threatening the health of millions of residents.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has been managing wildland fires on national forests and grasslands for more than 100 years, working closely with federal, tribal, state and local partners. The USFS uses fire imaging technologies like Full Motion Video (FMV) to provide critical awareness for fire line personnel, incident management teams, fire managers and agency administrators to inform tactical and strategic decisions. NV5 Geospatial recently teamed with the USFS to support their efforts to combat active fires with FMV.

Solution:

In September 2021, NV5 Geospatial successfully concluded a six-month pilot program with the USFS to better understand the challenges in disseminating FMV feeds of active fires to decision makers and first responders. Jagwire™ was the right solution for the job given its ability to not only ingest and archive video and imagery data, but also to stream video to other locations in near-real-time, such as to emergency personnel who were able to view video feeds via Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) devices.

Jagwire aided the USFS in receiving and restreaming FMV, visualizing AI-generated fire detections, as well as serving as the collection and dissemination “hub” and long-term archive solution. Jagwire facilitated video exploitation via tagging of FMV with Fire IDs, video chipping, annotation and dissemination to a number of supporting agencies. During this pilot period, Jagwire proved itself in facilitating situational awareness and supporting firefighting operations with video, imagery and derived products.

These images are from an FMV collection depicting both a visual capture of the wildfire as well as an infrared image.

Capitalizing on Jagwire’s flexibility and scalability, it was determined using Jagwire in the cloud, hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, would provide the most cost-effective approach for the USFS in both operational support and testing Jagwire for continued use. Using Jagwire in a cloud environment allowed the USFS to scale resources as needed, ultimately saving taxpayer dollars in not having to purchase and maintain additional hardware.

Conclusion:

Jagwire provides organizations a scalable end-to-end geospatial content management system for FMV and imagery ingest, visualization, dissemination and exploitation in near-real-time environments. Jagwire is designed to bring crucial data from the tactical edge to decision makers, even in low-bandwidth environments, regardless of their location. With a proven track-record dating back to 2004 when early versions provided combat and military support for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jagwire continues to be instrumental in military missions and worldwide humanitarian and relief operations during and in the aftermath of fires, hurricanes and floods.

Learn more about how Jagwire supports these missions or contact us to discuss if Jagwire might be the right solution for your operation.