Esri Community Member Spotlight: Doug Browning
This series of member spotlights features you and your peers here in Esri Community—the people playing a role in finding solutions, sharing ideas, and collaborating to solve problems with GIS. We’re doing this to recognize amazing user contributions, to model how Esri Community’s purpose is being brought to life, and to bring depth to this group of incredible people who may never meet in person, but who benefit from each other’s generous expertise.
Watch Doug's video interview in Kaltura
Sustaining Public Lands with Location Data
Preparing for an eight-day excursion into some of the most remote areas in the world takes time and careful planning under any circumstances. For the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Assessment Inventory Monitoring (AIM) team, this task comes with added challenges, beginning with the preparation and packing of a host of equipment they’ll need to assess natural resource conditions across the 245 million acres of U.S. public lands that BLM manages.
AIM team members take measurements and collect field samples for input into ArcGIS Survey123
The enormity of the area being monitored—10% of the entire United States’ land base—presents no small challenge. Every year, though, crews of three to five AIM team members gear up and head into the field to collect large samples of data that will later be used to inform policy and decision-making in the BLM’s mission: “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”
Doug Browning (@DougBrowning), a Geospatial Systems Architect contractor with the Sanborn Map Company relies on a foundation of ArcGIS in his work to support the AIM team. This ArcGIS-enabled work includes everything from navigating their field members to isolated survey sites, capturing massive data sets over repeated day-long assessments, and converting that data into useful information that’s linked to location.
Forms Built for a Huge Task
“That is an extremely complex problem to monitor what’s going on out there.” Doug remarks of the challenge he and the AIM team take on.
Doug’s primary focus concentrates on the ArcGIS Survey123 forms AIM team members in the field will use to enter data at each location they visit. He’s designed this suite of forms so that they remain applicable regardless of area of the country and environment they’re being used in, while leveraging ArcGIS Survey123’s ability to account for key differences across locations.
A species lookup is built right into an ArcGIS Survey123 form, saving time and effort
Doug elaborates, “… once you’re on site, we use ArcGIS Field Maps to launch Survey123, and pass over configuration variables and things like that, allowing the forms to adjust on the fly. That way we can have one form for the entire nation, and we don’t have to adjust it by state, but we can adjust it by state.”
“Each form has, say, their own species list that could be anywhere from 20 to 30,000 different species. And each state has a different one—like a plant might be native in one area but invasive in another. So, it all needs to dynamically change.”
For team members in the three AIM programs collecting and entering the data, they’ll visit around 8,000 sites and collect 100,000 images per season—working at each location to complete a series of 10 to 15 of Doug’s surveys. Breaking up the surveys this way is intentional, enabling each person on the three-to-five team to contribute on their own tablets simultaneously while together filling the 1,700 fields that must be completed by each program per site visited. These forms represent some of the most complex and intricate examples Esri’s ArcGIS Survey123 team has seen put into action.
Collaborating with the ArcGIS Survey123 Team
ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Survey123, ArcGIS Dashboards … these aren’t the only Esri products in Doug’s toolkit. In fact, you may have spotted Doug around or even been the beneficiary of his insights while he’s used another Esri offering: Esri Community.
“ In my 30 years of software development, I’ve never had that kind
of interaction and that all came from Esri Community. ”
When asked how he first started using Esri Community, Doug describes himself as always having been someone who reads through official help documentation and who scours message boards to help him learn and solve challenges. While both valuable, he finds differences between what the two resources offer users and what makes Esri Community particularly valuable to him.
“… I’ve also learned that’s the inside track. … I think the Community is that window into what’s going to work in real life situations or might work in a kind of a funky situation.”
He’s also seized the chance to collaborate with Esri staff directly in the platform; particularly when it comes to exchanging ideas and insights with the ArcGIS Survey123 team.
“… we did a lot of back and forth with our forms with the ArcGIS Survey123 team.” Doug notes. “… In my 30 years of software development, I’ve never had that kind of interaction, and that all came from Esri Community.”
And the benefits flow both ways. Where Doug has encountered opportunities to improve ArcGIS Survey123 through his own hands-on experience, he’s fed those insights back to the Esri product teams through the ArcGIS Ideas Exchange—in some cases helping fuel new features available to all users.
A Team of Peers and Pros in Esri Community
Over a more-than 10-year period of using Esri Community, Doug has published thousands of posts, nearly 400 of which are Accepted Solutions that have helped others overcome difficulties and solve problems they’ve faced in their own work. Due to his high degree of engagement and contributions, Doug became an Esri Community MVP in 2021.
“I always learn a lot. It improves what I do,” Doug says while reflecting on what it’s meant to not just receive help in Esri Community, but to also spend time offering help back to others.
“It gives me problems that I might not normally have and encourages me to work with techniques that I might not have used before.”
“It’s almost like living documentation. … We need to simulate to something that’s a real work problem. Esri Community is giving story problems; continuously testing your skills to really branch out your knowledge.”
To ArcGIS users who haven’t yet joined Esri Community, Doug offers encouragement to get involved by pointing out the hundreds of thousands of GIS folks who already use the platform to collaborate: “We’re going alone. I mean, why wouldn’t you want a whole team of real experts there to help you?”
Doug Browning is a Geospatial Data Systems Architect contractor with the Sanborn Map Company where he designs and manages large integrated workflows that combine ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Survey123 and more on behalf of the Bureau of Land Management. He’s also an Esri Community MVP who has contributed thousands of posts and hundreds of solutions to others’ GIS challenges over the years.