US Forest Service maps the future of wildland fire response with geospatial intelligence

Challenge

Wildland fires are burning through the United States at a rate well above the annual average thus far in 2025. As of late March, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) recorded 14,849 wildland fires across 707,228 acres for the year. That’s nearly double the number of fires (average to date: 8,773) and almost 100,000 more acres burned (average to date: 617,931) than the 10-year national averages.

Federal, state, and local wildland firefighting agencies need enhanced tools not only to fight this growing number of fires, but also to do so more efficiently and cost-effectively. To help achieve these goals, the United States Forestry Service (USFS) sought to modernize its Fire and Aviation Management Enterprise Geospatial Portal (EGP) and associated applications. In 2023, USFS selected ICF to lead the project, recognizing our unique ability to deeply integrate wildland fire subject-matter experts in the development of a technology solution.

EGP is a mission-critical system-of-systems that supports wildfire operations at the federal, state, and local level. It’s a hub that brings together geospatial data from across the interagency fire community, helping frontline firefighters, dispatch centers, leadership teams, and interagency partners make better decisions.

The modernized EGP addresses a variety of challenges the USFS and the NIFC faced with their legacy technology:

• The organizations use a suite of about a dozen apps for different purposes, but the apps are not interoperable.
• The apps rely on Wi-Fi or cellular networks to function, but such connectivity is challenging in remote areas under smoke cover.
• Some apps require multiple authentications, which can be cumbersome in the field.
• The apps couldn’t be updated during fire season because they were both fragile and vital to wildfire operations.

Streamlining these disparate apps into one solution can help firefighters save time and avoid confusion when clarity is of the essence. Whether used by incident commands, operations chiefs, dispatchers, or single resources, the modernized EGP is a one-stop intelligence source that can help responders save lives and property.

Solution

The first modernized app that sits within the EGP is WildFireSA. ICF developed this new situational awareness tool over the course of four phases:

• Phase 1: Completing discovery, inventory, and research into the legacy system data, applications, infrastructure, and architecture.
• Phase 2: Conducting stakeholder research to integrate user feedback into the application design, development, and workflow process. This included visits to active fire sites to interview users in the field and better understand their workflows.
• Phase 3: Developing the architecture for the new app, implementing an agile process in which users played a key role by providing continuous feedback.
• Phase 4: Transitioning firefighting agencies across the country from the legacy system to WildFireSA.

Although WildfireSA functions like the legacy platform, it streamlines the number of apps firefighters must use and offers a more user-friendly interface. The app uses optimized data sets and includes software that can track user interactions, providing important usability data that will inform the next phase of the platform’s features.

Results

WildFireSA was released into production in May 2025 and delivers superior situational awareness wildland firefighters need by significantly reducing their technology burden. The new app consolidates multiple data processing pipelines and streamlines interagency collaboration, reducing redundant IT infrastructure and software costs.

• Moving from the legacy solution to WildFireSA achieves significant cost savings for USFS (approximately $44,000 per month, or $525,000 per year) by eliminating legacy licensing fees.
• WildFireSA’s AI-driven analytics and predictive modeling tools improve decision-making, reducing the likelihood of costly emergency escalations and misallocated resources.
• This modernization expands access to the platform beyond the original 8,000+ users, integrating more interagency personnel and state/local partners.
• Improved workforce productivity through automation tools is estimated to achieve a 70% reduction in manual data entry.
• WildFireSA has achieved FedRAMP and USDA cybersecurity compliance via the integration of FAMAuth authentication.

What’s next?

We will continue to collaborate with USFS to enhance the modernized EGP and its associated applications (including WildFireSA) over the next several years, developing applications that are the gold standard for wildland fire situational awareness. The development roadmap includes:

• Rooting the Next Gen EGP in the cloud.
• Making the modernized EGP and apps like WildFireSA operable on mobile devices and functional in areas with little to no cellular or WiFi connectivity, giving wildland firefighters situational and tactical awareness no matter the environment they’re working in.
• Integrating additional datasets via seamless API integrations with agencies such as NOAA, NASA, NIFC, and FireGuard, enabling cross-agency intelligence sharing and strengthening national emergency response capabilities.
• Implementing AI-based fire behavior modeling and automated risk assessment dashboards, which are estimated to produce resource deployment efficiency gains of 15% or more.
• New features for data analytics and user workflows, as well as interface improvements to make the app as easy to use as possible.

To learn more about ICF’s work in developing WildFireSA and the Next Gen EGP, please contact our enterprise GIS Services team today.