State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB)

Cannabis Identification and Prioritization System (CIPS)

PROBLEM: The cultivation of Cannabis in rural parts of California has been increasing which has resulted in significant environmental impacts in the watersheds of California; such as, increased pollution in the local, regional, and state water supplies, increased soil erosion, as well as increased nutrient and pesticide laden runoff. California’s extreme drought conditions have further magnified these impacts.

SOLUTION: The SWRCB and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife were tasked with trying to regulate this activity. As a part of this effort, they contracted with VESTRA to design a Cannabis Identification and Prioritization System (CIPS), which acts both as a repository of geospatial information on grow locations and a tool for helping the agencies prioritize their regulatory efforts based on the potential impact individual grows have on water resources, fish, and wildlife.

VESTRA, along with Formation Environmental, worked to capture grow locations and developed raster datasets which include percent slope, length of slope, evapotranspiration and proximity to surface water.  These raster datasets are used along with information on the proximity of threatened fish and wildlife to model the level of threat associated with each grow, allowing the agencies to establish priorities for action.

CIPS APPLICATION: VESTRA was responsible for the design and development of the system.  One of the project requirements was that the system leverages the SWRCB’s existing Esri Enterprise system.  The development effort includes a JavaScript web interface to be used by agency staff tasked with regulating Cannabis cultivation and geoprocessing services that are used to model the environmental threat based on the factors a user wants to consider in their analysis along with the weight they associate with each factor. 

The web interface includes an operations dashboard that summarizes the number of grows that have been identified in the state, whether they’re outdoor or greenhouse grows, the number in each SWRCB region, and the estimated amount of water consumed by each grow.  This dashboard is updated nightly as data becomes available.

California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development

VESTRA has been supporting the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) as they work to develop a statewide enterprise GIS for quality policy analysis, allocation of funding resources, and to aid in the monitoring of healthcare quality throughout the state. The Healthcare Atlas also includes emergency departments and ambulatory services. Work was performed to re-engineer the mapping applications in order to interface with a new data warehouse that dramatically expand the GIS user interface using ASP.NET. The internal OSHPD Website receives live earthquake data to assist OSHPD’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in providing support and regional coordination to hospitals affected by an earthquake. This EOC portion of the application received a “Best of California” award in 2008.

Click here to read Esri's article, "California Healthcare Atlas Offers Single Easy-to-Use Portal."

CALFIRE CAD

VESTRA supported the conversion of County roads datasets to Northrop Grumman CAD Dispatch system schema that is used by CalFire. The process included the creation of advanced and sophisticated ETL and geoprocessing tools for data conversion and manipulation of large roads datasets. The process included updating addressing and routing attributes of roads as well as the road geometry.

California Department of Water Resources

Utilizing the Department of Water Resources' (DWR) information technology architecture standards, VESTRA’s team developed a Model Conversion Plan that outlined a solution to resolve issues that DWR had with the application prior to any redesign. The plan described the steps required to convert the existing stand-alone GIS methodology to a multi-user GIS solution, improving business workflow processes, as well as scripting of geoprocessing tools, development of custom user interfaces, and deployment of an ArcSDE geodatabase and ArcGIS for Server in DWR's environment.

Following the model conversion plan VESTRA’s team redesigned DWR’s desktop GIS solution to be a multi-use enterprise GIS solution using the ArcGIS for Server and ArcGIS for Desktop 10.2 platform.  Following development of the new solution, VESTRA's team implemented, deployed, and trained DWR staff on the use of the multi-user solution.

VESTRA is currently supporting the Department of Water Resources (DWR) with the Geospatial Technical Support project. This multi-year contract involves assessing DWR’s current Enterprise GIS Architecture. Working with DWR’s Division of Technology Services, VESTRA is assisting in reviewing and modifying their standards-based, scalable geospatial infrastructure to provide for interoperable data sharing and enterprise-wide geospatial data processing. Also included in this project is the development of a library of commonly used web and desktop GIS functions for incorporation into future applications.