The Governor’s Commission to Rebuild Texas is making it possible for the many officials at all levels of government engaged in Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts to literally get on the same page using a new software application developed by the Texas A&M Forest Service.

Earlier this week, the Texas A&M Forest Service shared the software with Florida officials, who will also implement it in their recovery efforts after Hurricane Irma.

The Geospatial Information System-based application was originally developed by the Texas A&M Forest Service for the purpose of tracking the distribution of water, ice, food, blankets, and other commodities at regional staging areas following Hurricane Harvey. By building on the original design, they have created a platform that will allow users at all levels of government to review assessments of all types of local needs throughout the Gulf Coast and monitor responses to each issue in real time.

“The Governor created the Commission to cut through red tape and get to work rebuilding an even stronger Texas. To be successful, we need to be sure that every piece of critical information is reaching all of our responders and nothing is falling through the cracks,” said Commissioner John Sharp, who also serves as Chancellor of The Texas A&M University System. “This application makes that possible, and it is already poised to be a national model. I am very proud of the Texas A&M Forest Service for coming up with yet another new way to better serve people in Texas and elsewhere.”

The new application, which will be implemented this week, was developed using mapping and analytics software created by the company Esri coupled with the field data collection tool Survey123.

“As an incident response agency, we are always seeking faster, better ways to work,” said Tom Boggus, Director of Texas A&M Forest Service. “Our GIS specialists developed this application to streamline some of our tasks in the response stage of the incident, and we’ve simply adapted it to be effective for part of the recovery stage as well.”

For more information about how Texas A&M Forest Service is responding to Harvey, please visit http://texasforestservice.tamu.edu/currentsituation/.