Why was FireFlight made?

Our clients, the USDA Forest Service, have developed a predictive model capable of taking current bird presence data in a wilderness area, and using it to predict the future bird presence in various grid areas within that wilderness. However, this creates an immense amount of data that is difficult to sort through and use efficiently for research and such.

What does FireFlight seek to do?

The FireFlight team was tasked with finding a user friendly way to easily view and export the predicted bird presence data in a particular area.

How is this done?

The FireFlight program seeks to achieve the goals of the project through the following features:

• An intuitive and interactive embedded map of the wilderness area, displaying predicted bird presence through a heat map-style visualization.
• The ability to easily export/download the predicted bird presence data in spreadsheet form.

We designed these features with the following goals in mind:

• Ease of access- We designed this program with the intention of non-technical adept users being able to easily use it.
• Easy querying- The program allows users to apply filter pertaining to bird species, and is built in a way that it should also be able to handle adding location filtering in future development.
• Clear visualization- The heat map and exported data file are designed to clearly visualize the relevant information.
• Security- Since this program is built around using proprietary United States government, we designed the program and development process in a way that protects access to the database being used.
• Built for future maintenance- For the sake of future development, especially by those other than the original FireFlight group, we ensured that our code was readable, and documentation easily accessible and understandable.