Hey everyone, my name is Kate Burns and I have a University background in Geological Hazards (BSc, BA, PGDipSci). I have 20 years of GIS experience in local government (in my early career at Waitakere City Council and more recently Waimakariri District Council). I also spent some time in the private sector when I spent 3 years as a GIS Analyst with Tonkin & Taylor's Land Damage Assessment Team, following the Canterbury Earthquakes.  I'm currently partway through a Master of Emergency Management degree which I undertake part time via distance. As of very recently, I now work for New Zealand Red Cross as a Projects Advisor (primarily not a GIS role), where I am able to utilise both streams of my education. I am involved in business process design, project support, app programmes and DRM & EOC support. I will also keep a hand in with the ESRI products moving forward within Red Cross.  ... View more

Hello GeoNet,  I am using earthquake data gathered in New Zealand and I am having difficulty getting the longitude coordinate to work. All my points plot just south of Africa, in the ocean, on the Greenwich England line. I have tried assigning a different coordinate system, projecting, and calculating the longitude to zero. But, none of that worked. I've absolutely checked the coordinates to ensure they are New Zealand. Those are in lat/long decimal degrees.  Thanks for your help! Lisa Marie ... View more

Please see New Zealand GIS for Emergency Management Community to the official website of NZGIS4EM. ... View more

The first release of the New Zealand Common Alerting Protocol Guidelines has been released:  This is great news for New Zealand as it provides the first geospatial intelligence for notification of forecast and current hazards. It is used by other counties and we can learn from their approach.  Key Message: If you work in the geospatial industry, this is going to impact you, so follow closely! Resources Public Alert and Warning Training Materials - (from the US National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation) In the United States they use a system called IPAWS and it is based on CAP. The data is provided in the standard XML format via a hub and then made available as live, scalable web services in a variety of OGC formats with standardized symbology. NZ Common Alerting Protocol Guideline - This document is written by the New Zealand CAP Working Group and owned by the ‘Principal Advisor - National Operations, Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management (MCDEM)’. Before using this guideline always email opsteam@dpmc.govt.nz to check you have the latest version. Version 1.0 is a draft intended to be available for Alerting Authorities and vendors to refer to, but with a number of areas still under development at working group meetings. This document is an accompaniment to the definition of Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). It describes how to implement CAP in the New Zealand alerting environment. It is suitable for: Developing business analysis requirements for CAP messages; Developing logic for the interchange or uptake of CAP messages; Discovering further useful CAP resources; Becoming an official Alerting Authority and joining the Working Group. Here is a feature layer view that is using the MetService CAP feed as the source: http://eaglegis.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=b4967d1b25c349edb1fa20a182568c19#overview  Here is an example of using MetService CAP Feeds in a web mapping application. ... View more

This week there were updates to both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro 2.0 was released. This is a short blog post to highlight what is relevant for emergency management in New Zealand.  1) The Solutions for Emergency Management have also been updated (What's New | ArcGIS for Emergency Management). This includes updated symbology in the Service Catalog (simpler, easier to read symbols). A series of enhancements to Situational Awareness Viewer, Logistics Planning, and Operations Response. A series of enhancements to the ArcGIS Solutions Deployment Tool. 2) Web AppBuilder Widgets (What’s New in Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS (June 2017) | ArcGIS Blog ) Full Screen Widget – This enables web apps to launch in full screen mode in your web browser.  Grid Overlay Widget - For those of you working with NZ Defence Force and Urban Search and Rescue in the US, this is a great addition. This will render and display a US Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) grid dynamically and at different index levels inside the application based on the scale of the map display. Screening widget – Enables you to define an area of interest (based on a placename and buffer distance; drawing a point, line, or polygon; an input shapefile that defines the spatial extent; or a coordinate location and buffer distance) and analyze specified layers for potential impacts. The analysis results can be shared with others as a printed report, CSV file, and file geodatabase or shapefile download. Below I have configured this widget to work with a Situation Report feature layer template.   See the PDF report produced here.   3) Web AppBuilder Dashboard Theme (Theme—Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS | ArcGIS)  The new theme displays all the widgets in the panel simultaneously when the app starts. It is designed to visualize widgets and their communication directly. You can modify the predefined layout by adding, removing, or resizing the grids in the panel. By default, most on-screen widgets are turned off except for the Home and Zoom Slider widgets. Optionally, you can turn on the Header widget to display the logo, the app name, and links. ... View more