NACIS 2026

Should I stay or should I go? Encouraging early bushfire evacuation through fire spread prediction maps
Amy Griffin, RMIT University
Chloe Begg, Country Fire Authority
Matt Blanc, RMIT University
Erica Kuligowski, RMIT University
Paula Dootson, QUT University
Angela Gardner, Victorian Department of Education
Bushfire is a significant hazard in Australia, affecting much of the population. A policy of shared responsibility for protective action decision making between the government and residents means bushfire maps are a critical input into decision making. This presentation reports on the findings of a series of studies with end users that tested the efficacy and comprehensibility of bushfire spread predictions that were added to traditional bushfire warning maps in a simulated fire scenario. It reflects on the role of maps in the wider information ecosystem that residents use to understand emergency situations and the complexities of communicating what is known in situations that are often highly uncertain.

Reimagining Heat: An experimental mapping of the Los Angeles heatscape
Arfa Momin, University of California, Berkeley
Advised by Clancy Wilmott (Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography at Berkeley Centre for New Media and Department of Geography)
Heat is woven into many disciplines—climate, energy, public health, ecology—and its effects are felt globally. Yet despite (and perhaps because) of this reach, heat is often overlooked in critical geographic conversations. Heat is not simply a fixed reading on a thermometer, but something relational, emerging from encounters between atmospheres, bodies, and social circumstances. Conventional maps show where heat is, but not how it is produced, distributed and lived asymmetrically. This project asks what it would mean to make a map that reveals as heat does. Using Los Angeles as a case study, I’ll present a digital 3D cartographic tool to visualize the unevenness of heat while attempting to push the representational limits of mapping itself.
(Link to project: reimagine-heat.com)

From Mandates to Maps: Leveraging GIS and Web Mapping to Communicate Locally Relevant Climate Risks and Inform Climate Change Adaptation
Jonnell Robinson, Syracuse University
GIS-based spatial analysis and web mapping offer powerful tools for communicating climate hazards and risks to residents, planners, and policymakers. This presentation will demonstrate how we leveraged ArcGIS Online and StoryMaps to support the City of Syracuse’s Climate Vulnerability Assessment for New York State’s Climate Smart Communities Program. We used GIS to visualize climate data, historical weather events, community assets, and vulnerable people and places to aid the city’s efforts to publicly communicate locally relevant climate change risks, including increased extreme weather events, flooding, and heat. The maps reveal uneven geographies of climate risk vulnerability, such as flood-prone neighborhoods, aging infrastructure, and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods and present opportunities to empower residents and inform place-based policy interventions at the local scale.

City and County of Denver’s Digital Storm Drainage Master Plan: Communicating Flood Risk through Interactive Web Mapping
Josephine Sajbel, Stantec
This presentation highlights the transformation of a 230-page stormwater master plan into a GIS platform using ArcGIS Hub and ArcGIS Experience Builder. The project combined updated modeling, GIS schema improvements, and interactive web mapping to support both engineering analysis and public education. The platform includes flood risk mapping, infrastructure improvement projects, and document access tools designed for a wide range of users. Amidst balancing technical functionality with accessibility, designing repeatable workflows, and creating user-focused maps, the SDMP aims to help the community to better understand flood risk and prioritize capital investments related to flood mitigation projects.

.fillyay() or .fillnay()? Evaluating Weather Data Gap-Filling Strategies for Operational Fire Danger Modeling
Tracy Tien, Texas A&M Forest Service
Data gaps from weather stations are inevitable and a common flare-up in fire weather modeling. This project develops a Google Cloud Platform framework that builds a historical ERA5 Land Hourly weather archive leveraging Google Earth Engine and BigQuery to gap-fill observations from weather stations. Five gap-filling methods were evaluated using the National Fire Danger Rating System python module, across a sample of weather stations varying in data completeness, climatology length, and geography. Performance was validated against fire occurrence data, and the results inform on-going enhancements to the operational fire danger products for the state of Texas.