Esri Community Member Spotlight: Tari Martin
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 Tari's video interview in Kaltura
Improving Public Safety with GIS
When Tari Martin (@TariMartin1) and her team at the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation (NAPSG) demonstrate how GIS enhances emergency response capabilities, there’s often an abrupt click of comprehension from the audience. An atmosphere of enthusiasm takes over the space.
“It’s like a lightbulb goes off,” Tari says. “You know when you see someone from the first responder community—they get so excited about GIS because they just get it. They know how it can support their jobs.”
NAPSG is a non-profit organization based out of Washington, D.C. that provides free, nationwide support towards the adoption of GIS in public safety. Through their work, NAPSG bridges gaps between public safety disciplines, aids in the implementation of GIS tools and strategies, and provides no-cost resources to improve outcomes for emergency and disaster survivors.
Tari is NAPSG’s Director of National and Federal, where she’s worked for the better part of a decade. She shares that, through NAPSG’s work, public safety departments that integrate GIS in into their operations experience tremendous benefits.
Having the opportunity to view GIS within the context of their own community’s needs transforms public safety department thinking from a ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ approach to data-driven decision making that can protect more lives and livelihoods.
Preparing for Emergencies During Blue Skies
With a mission that extends to all corners of the United States, the scope and versatility of NAPSG’s work must be extensive if it’s to be successful. The top three to five threats facing one community may be entirely different than those looming over another, stunting one-size-fits-all solutions. What’s more, practices that have long been the standard for disaster preparedness are becoming increasingly ill-equipped to handle some of the greatest public safety risks currently facing the U.S.
“We are notoriously bad at predicting what disasters are coming,” Tari remarks of the larger public safety community. She elaborates that, for a long time, disaster preparedness plans have been almost entirely based on hazards that took place in the past.
That’s a problem when key factors surrounding emergencies are changing the way disasters manifest—factors like climate change, larger numbers of people living in vulnerable areas, or even an aging population. And challenging circumstances are expected to grow steeper in the coming decades.
“ There’s a lot of data out there on vulnerable populations. There’s a lot of
data out there on communities that have potential challenges to resilience,
and all of that is in geospatial format. ”
Tari stresses the importance of pre-planning as an essential part of the public safety framework. She informs that data can change the way we prepare by making it possible to better predict what disasters may look like in the future and how their impacts can be mitigated.
She explains, “There’s a lot of data out there on vulnerable populations. There’s a lot of data out there on communities that have potential challenges to resilience, and all of that is in geospatial format. Emergency managers can take advantage of that to understand what things they need to put in place during blue skies—before a disaster happens—to understand how they can reach those communities and get them ready ahead of time.”
ArcGIS Boosts Recruitment and Sharpens Decision Making
GIS-informed planning is just one aspect of the framework NAPSG brings to public safety before an emergency ever takes shape. Workforce improvements that ensure adequate personnel and securing grants to fund necessary response resources are examples of crucial components within public safety that GIS data supports.
Tari illustrates this through some of NAPSG’s work with the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC). “Right now, they’re building firefighter volunteer toolkits for states to use. We’ve helped them build one for North Carolina and it started with an ArcGIS Survey123 survey to several associations with the goal of understanding why someone became a volunteer firefighter and why they’ve stayed. We used that information to build out a toolkit to help them recruit and retain future volunteers.”
With the majority of fire departments in the U.S. being full volunteer or reliant on volunteers, recruitment falling short of population growth, and emergency calls increasing, there’s a paramount need to boost the ranks of volunteer firefighters.
The toolkit NAPSG helped the IAFC develop uses ArcGIS Experience Builder and ArcGIS Survey123 to help fire departments recruit and retain volunteers by helping them tap into patterns of inspiration and by distilling reasons that sustain long-term volunteer involvement. GIS data provided through the kit helps departments identify recruiting event locations and track their results via a dashboard. Departments also receive community demographic data from NAPSG, enabling them to perform a review of their own teams to identify who may be missing as they seek to bring in under-represented talent and better reflect the populations they serve. This toolkit is in the process of being distributed to all 50 U.S. states.
North Carolina Volunteer Firefighter Recruitment & Retention survey results dashboard
Another program out of NAPSG, the Search and Rescue Common Operating Procedure (SARCOP), is changing the game in a big way for emergency responders when catastrophe finally strikes.
Situational awareness is often very limited during the early hours of a disaster. Incident command overseeing response may have little visibility over the areas or people being impacted, or the degree to which assistance is needed. With the clock ticking and an escalated need to prioritize which resources go where, developing a picture of on-the-ground data is a top need.
In many cases, the first opportunity to gather important data comes from Search and Rescue personnel. Through the SARCOP program, Search and Rescue teams are being trained to use Esri mobile products that feed data to dashboards that decision makers can closely monitor—often in real-time. From making damage observations, assessing ongoing risks, noting who needs rescue, and disclosing already searched areas, those initial responders provide information invaluable to an efficient and effective response.
A Community for Public Safety GIS
A great deal of useful information is generated during disaster events. Groups like FEMA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Geological Survey—all agencies that NAPSG works closely with—collect and publish data directly applicable to what’s taking place. All too often, though, that information isn’t picked up by the GIS practitioners who could best leverage it.
“ One of the one of the great things about the Community is that you do
build up this network and it's particularly important for public safety GIS folks
to have that network during blue skies. ”
“During disasters, we often see a lot of data getting created and it’s not often getting where it needs to go,” Tari states. “A lot of folks working in GIS and public safety are a one-person shop and they’re head down during a disaster. They’re not always able to stop and look around to see what’s available.”
This challenge in mind, NAPSG began looking for a mechanism they could use to close the gap between information available and the people who needed it. At that point, Tari had already been using Esri Community for some time to find answers to her questions or keep up to date on information about ArcGIS products she was using. NAPSG’s need for a solution to under-accessed, valuable data intersected with Tari’s own realization that Esri Community offered more than a place to find answers to her questions. She began to recognize it as being a place to connect and collaborate. She worked with the Esri Community team to create a User Group where useful data could be centralized.
“We were trying to make sure that if imagery was being collected, if models were being run, if certain models were performing well, [that information was shared]. So, we started putting that out through the Community and that seemed to receive some good traction.”
“One of the great things about Esri Community is that you do build up this network and it's particularly important for public safety GIS folks to have that network during blue skies.”
Over the years, Tari has continued to turn to Esri Community as a multi-faceted tool in her toolbox and encourages other GIS professionals in the public safety sphere to think of it the same way. Whether it be used to find answers to questions, learn about the ArcGIS tools available, exchange mutually beneficial insights, or network with peers, Tari appreciates that Esri Community is keen to what the GIS community is like.
She reflects, “We love to share. We love to be helpful. It all kind of culminates in Esri Community.”
Tari Martin is Director of National and Federal at the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation (NAPSG). There, she supports all of NAPSG’s nationwide contracts to equip them with the free training and resources needed to bring GIS into public safety response before, during, and after threats occur.