30 The bare earth digital elevation model (DEM) service from IIPP with the on-the-fly processing template turns the layer into a multidirectional hillshade service in ArcGIS Pro. for the Forest Service. Gillham and Dave Vanderzanden, enterprise data and services program leader at the Forest Service, originated the project at the US Forest Service’s Geospatial Technology and Applications Center. The duo reached out to geospatial administrators at various federal agencies and received guarded enthusiasm for the concept. Their queries revealed a widespread dissatisfaction with current imagery hosting options and a desire to use more imagery to understand landscape changes across the country. With support from the Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS), the first cross-agency geospatial data sharing service—the Interdepartmental Imagery Publication Platform (IIPP)— launched in May 2024. Rob Dollison, the National Map delivery services lead at USGS, related how IIPP has provided a learning opportunity for all. “We’ve been able to share the process of building an image service in the cloud, and the Forest Service has done a lot to organize and host historical imagery,” he said. “We each brought expertise to the table.” Advantages of the Cloud The government’s cloud-first pledge, and innovations in cloud-native technologies, finally made it feasible to create a shared data source for imagery. With the cloud, each agency can maintain control of its own data while gaining access to a larger trove of imagery for its users in this collaborative system. “Interestingly, the cloud-first strategy wasn’t our top consideration when we started four years ago,” Gillham
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