This year’s recipient of the annual award is the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data community for support of the 2017 hurricane season. Leveraging the GeoPlatform shared service, the HIFLD community collaboratively delivered geospatial data and services to communities and first responders to help minimize and recover from hurricane impacts.

The HIFLD open data portal, established through the GeoPlatform shared service, provides national foundation-level geospatial data within the public domain that can be used to support community preparedness, resiliency, research and more. The HIFLD open-data portal also enables the dissemination of more than 300 publicly accessible Homeland Security Infrastructure Program data products and web services. Since its inception in February 2016, this HIFLD open-data portal has been used by more than 35,472 users with more than 31,695 data downloads.

In response to hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, HIFLD members worked collaboratively to provide a centralized site, using GeoPlatform.gov, to host unclassified, publicly available geospatial data, applications, tools and web services. HIFLD4Irma, which was also used to support Hurricane Maria, and HIFLD4Harvey served as authoritative sources of geospatial data and services to 12,850 users with more than 2,920 downloads in a little over 30 days of being established.

These portals became an authoritative source of relevant data for use by local, state, federal, tribal, private-sector and community partners. They served as a hub to aggregate and disseminate open data to support the mapping activities for hurricane response and recovery. This first-of-its-kind type of operational response by HIFLD has been met with great enthusiasm and direct positive feedback from the Executive Office of the White House, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and boots-on-the-ground first responders.

About HIFLD

The Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data community was established in February 2002 to address improvements in collection, processing, sharing and protection of homeland infrastructure geospatial information across multiple levels of government and to develop a common foundation of homeland infrastructure data to be used for visualization and analysis on all classification domains. The HIFLD community, led by the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of the Interior, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, includes 5,860 mission partners representing 14 federal executive departments, 98 agencies, 53 states and territories, and more than 700 private-sector participants.

The HIFLD subcommittee of the FGDC is a voluntary coalition of federal, state, and local government organizations and private-industry partners who are involved with geospatial issues related to homeland defense and security as well as emergency preparedness and response. The subcommittee also includes civil support members and non-federal contributors who are involved in a wide range of different functions such as critical infrastructure protection, crisis and consequence management, intelligence and threat analysis, antiterrorism/force protection, defense support to civil authorities, man-made and natural hazard modeling, and government facilities management.

The HIFLD initiative embodies the principles in OMB Circular A-16, applies National Geospatial Data Asset data for decision-making, and meets all eight foundational precepts of the Doug D. Nebert Award selection criteria.

Team members of HIFLD include:

From the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency: Rexford Tugwell, Mike Piscotti, John Carlin, Lina Dailide-Custodio, John Murtagh, William Nellist, Justin Reed, Todd Coon

From the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS: Peter O’Rourke, Rebecca Harned, Tari Martin, Angela Pervél, Paul Doherty

From the Department of the Interior: Tod Dabolt, Kayloni Ah Tong

From the Department of Homeland Security, Geospatial Management Office: Lewis Summers, Michael Bergman, Chris Brehany, Travis Hardy, Julie Eckert, Zachary Gordon, Matt Pagan, Jonathan Rayer, Nate Smith, Robert Shumowsky

From the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency: Chris Vaughan, Dante Terango, Brad Bottoms, Julie Carter

ESRI: Bill McGilvery, Stuart Rucker, Charmel Menzel

Booz Allen: Tom Springsteen, Katie Zezima

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