A Catalyst For Solutions
Decision makers need data to determine where to put resources and investments that can help build climate and wildfire resilience in California. But current data systems are either antiquated, disparate, varied across agencies, or otherwise not used to their fullest potential; this is a major problem in getting good work done on the ground—and a problem the Wildfire and Landscape Resilience Data Hub (Data Hub) aims to solve.
The resulting community-informed blueprint will harness the connections between scientists, data producers, and land managers to create pathways for a scalable, sustainable, and more effective data hub.
The essential problem that the Wildfire and Landscape Resilience Data Hub hopes to address is the difficulty in integrating available data to support decision-making informed by treatments, challenges, and conditions on the ground. Our potential solutions come into clearer focus as we move through each phase of the project timeline.
Timeline:
It’s much more difficult to get where you need to be if you don’t know exactly where you are. Better understanding past, present, and future forest conditions is a key priority of the Wildfire and Landscape Resilience Data Hub. This is a critical problem to solve on our path to building greater fire resilience in California, and towards a better understanding of what could work elsewhere in the West and world. Here is a high level overview of the Data Hub’s timeline:
Partners:
Anticipated Outcomes:
Data Ingest
A data hub can be used to ingest data models, metadata and index data from many sources, making it easier to access and manage data.
Data Integration
The Data Hub will be used to integrate data from multiple sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, and other file formats. This will help to ensure that data is consistent and up-to-date and will make it easier to analyze and use data.
Data Security and Governance
The Data Hub will be used to manage access to data, ensure that data is secure, and enforce data quality standards.
Data Search and Exploration
The Data Hub will enable finding all related data and exploration and analysis of data from many sources through cross-querying and visualization methods.
Data Analytics
The Data Hub will be used to perform analytics on data, such as data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis.
Data Hub FAQ:
Our vision is to develop the Data Hub into a ground-informed, community-driven, inclusive, extensible, federated, and nimble collection of data that can be used to drive better decision making. Basically—we want to ensure that the people who are allocating resources and investments know where those resources are most needed based on the best data we have available to us.
We know that the lack of integration and management of data across agencies, institutions, research centers, and NGOs hinders our ability to actually use the immensely valuable data we already have available to us. To be as effective as possible in getting this work done, the Climate and Wildfire Institute (CWI) has facilitated the development of the Data Hub to utilize an information modeling approach informed by on-the-ground conditions and forecasts. CWI will provide the overall management and coordination of the Data Hub development—a key CWI role will be the facilitation of contributions to the Data Hub by partners and the support of the Advisory Panel.
There are a few essential questions that we hope to answer as we continue developing the Data Hub.
- Can a federated data/governance system promote data sharing while maintaining security?
- Can the Data Hub provide a platform that leads to more comprehensive and authoritative reporting of fuel reduction projects?
- Does the implementation of a Data Hub produce improvements in project planning and strategic placement of fuel/vegetation management projects?
- What components of a Data Hub (e.g., data access, reporting, data visualization) are most important to users?
- What investments in systems architecture, shared partnerships, and staffing are needed to maintain a Data Hub over the next 5-10 years?
- What is a realistic and sustainable model for governance?
The initial two years of the Data Hub project will focus on building the infrastructure to support the Data Hub and integrating existing inputs identified by the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force (like the Regional Resource Kits, Interagency Tracking System, etc.).
There will be multiple ways to become involved with this project at different stages. For example, we’ll start exploring additional data sources after 18 months but we will be looking for input on planning tools after the first year.
In order to capture all the interest, please fill out this form and select all the options of how you’d like to stay involved.
Get in touch with us about the Data Hub:
