VESTRA was retained by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) to incorporate a mapping component into their existing Pest Disease Record application. The application collects pest and damage records from a large and geographically diverse audience that includes internal staff, local authorities, individual farmers, other state agencies, and the US Department of Agriculture. The purpose of this project is to extend the current Pest and Damage Record system to include Internet-based GIS components that allow treatment/ eradication areas and quarantine boundaries to be established quickly.

The primary GIS application called “PDR Mapping” enhanced the existing Pest Disease Control Program application and supplies basic mapping functions for an estimated 1,200 users.

A secondary application launched from the first, called “Quarantine Boundary Editor,” supports initial quarantine boundary generation, quarantine boundary (polygon) editing, and quarantine boundary (polygon) merge functions.

The Quarantine Boundary Editor is one of the first applications to support hosted simultaneous multi-user GIS editing over the Internet. The tool is for use in a pest/disease outbreak situation by local and state officials to establish workable eradication and quarantine boundaries quickly based on local knowledge of the area. Each participant in the editing session is able to review the generated boundaries, and if desired, request control of the editing session to move lines (vertices) to change the boundaries.

The current process of sending markups of maps back and forth between state and local officials is tedious, taking hours to accomplish. The new system is expected to require only minutes to collaborate and agree upon a set of boundaries.

The system is entirely browser-based, meaning that anyone from 1,200 anticipated users may participate without specialized software or training.