The El Centro Field office Bureau of Land Management has been challenged the past year with situations that have lead to the need to be able to use GIS in the field. In the past we have rarely used GIS in real time field applications and would use Arc View on a laptop computer.
As part of a settlement to a lawsuit we were going to need to close part of the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area to vehicle use. This would require us to place signs in the middle of the dunes with no fixed land marks or survey points for reference. We would also be required to fly over the dunes once a week to monitor the closed areas.
Monitoring of listed threatened, endangered and special status species has always been a priority for the Bureau of Land Management and we could see a need to help improve the monitoring process to enable us to save time in updating databases.
GIS has also become an integral part of fighting wild land fires over the past five years. It is used to map fire boundaries, predict fire spread and analysis threats. The faster we can get answers to these questions on a fire the better it can be managed.
In October I started to look for rugged computers that would work well in the harsh environment of the Imperial Sand Dunes to be used with Arcpad. We would use these computers with GPS units to help define and maintain the closure boundaries. About the same time I saw a demonstration by Tom Patterson the, Fire Management Officer for Joshua Tree National Park, using Arcpad on a pocket PC. These hand held devices use the Windows CE operating system and are more versatile then a PDA. I could see that these would be easier to take to the field that a laptop computer. Also BLM California was trying to decide what type of PDA or Pocket Computers to use and El Centro was chosen to test Pocket Computers.
On January 3, 2001 a fire started in the meridian strip of I-8 just east of Viejas in San Diego County California. Tom Patterson, Joe Appleton, Kern County Fire Department and myself were dispatched to the fire to provide GPS/GIS support. This would be the first opportunity to use hand held computers and Arcpad on a fire. Tom Patterson was using a Compaq iPAQ with 32 mb of ram and a Kingston 2gb PCMCIA Card hard drive. I was using an IBM Jornada 548 with 32mb of ram and a 128mb Flash Card memory Card.
We developed set of georeferenced bitmaps for 100k and 24k topo maps of the area to use for a background layer. We were now ready to start flying. In the past we would fly the fire line mapping it with a GPS unit and then return to base and post process the data changing into shape files or ArcInfo coverages and then build maps for the planning staff. This time we would be making the shape files in arcpad as we were flying the fire and have them ready to add to maps as soon as we returned to base. By using the theme form extension for Arcpad in Arcview we were able to attribute the lines as we collected them.
Since the Viejas fire we have used Arcpad and Pocket PCs on a number of fires. Using mosaics of maps and DOQs we can plan strategies and share files and information on the fire line of small fires. It has enabled us to plan fire lines, determine immediate threats and see fuel loading in front of advancing fires. On one fire we were able to transfer the fire perimeter from one Pocket PC to another via IR ports in the field
Peirson's Milkvetch was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species act in 1996. It is though to only occur in the Imperial Sand Dunes in Eastern Imperial County, California. In November of 2000 we temporarily closed portions of the sand dunes to vehicles to protect the plants habitat while consulting with the Fish and Wildlife service on the effects of vehicle use to the plant.
The boundaries of the closures were established using data from plant surveys done previously and stored in GIS. We then determined geographic locations for the corners of the closures and used survey grade GPS units to establish these points in the sand dunes. We were then able to sign the boundaries in between the corners using Arcpad and GPS units.
We then used Arcpad on a iPAQ pocket PC to help with the monitoring over flights. Using Lizard Tech's Mr. Sid image compression software I generated a mosaic of 25 Digital Ortho Quads and 9 100k topos of the dunes area and southern California. These images used less then 700mb of storage space verses 32gb of uncompressed space. Using these backgrounds we could follow the aircrafts position in reference to the boundaries. We could then easily find the lines of signs on the ground and determine where intrusion had happened and where signs would need to be replaced. Field staff could then use the same set up to navigate to the boundaries and replace signs.
When we started the annual plant monitoring we able to use Arcpad to follow the monitoring transects and view previous years data about monitoring cells. We could have also updated the data at the same time but chose not to this year as we had a limited amount of time to train the many volunteers that we use in plant monitoring and a limited number of pocket PCs.
BLM manages the Flat-tailed Horned Lizard under an inter agency Management agreement. We are using Arcpad to follow monitoring transects and record data. This data is then used to help develop trends in lizard populations.
During field trips staff can use the data and location capabilities to discuss possible impacts from proposed actions on site.
As wireless technology improves over the next few years we will be able to serve GIS data over networks to units in the field. This will enable us to us data that is stored back in the office in real time field situations. Staff will be able to call up and update the base data from the field and edit it real time. The most current data will be available to others to use with out the delay of returning to the office and uploading the most recent data. This in my opinion is probably one of the most import capabilities that will come about from Arcpad and field us of GIS