Ireland EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)

Employing 340 people at ten locations throughout Ireland, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is at the front line for environmental protection and policing. Their primary mission is to protect and improve the natural environment for present and future generations. They provide many services, including assessing and reporting on the state of the environment, environmental licensing, regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, proactive waste management, and environmental planning, education, and guidance.

In late 2007, the EPA sought to improve its process of investigation and reporting for Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of proposed development plans and programs across Ireland. Specifically, the SEA team required an automated approach to create complex assessment reports with the goal of improving productivity by reducing the time required to conduct investigations. At the time, the SEA team created assessment reports manually by pulling information from a variety of different sources and collating into a text document for dissemination to its users. This process proved to be time consuming and generally unsatisfactory.

Given the spatial context of environmental assessment reporting, the SEA team decided to build a web-based GIS application that provided all the functionality of the agency’s existing ArcIMS site, with the additional capability of automating report production for environmental impact analysis.

After experiencing issues during an attempt at delivering reporting via ArcIMS, the EPA chose to move its web-GIS development to ArcGIS Server and leverage its broader technical capabilities. At the outset of development, the EPA decided on ESRI’s .NET ADF as the base on which to build their SEA viewer. The EPA chose Geocortex Essentials to augment Web ADF and facilitate the development of complex custom reports required for the application.

With the assistance of Latitude Geographics, the EPA built a customized SEA web-GIS viewer to help users automate assembly and creation of environmental assessment reports.

Today, output from the SEA viewer consists of a multi-page environmental assessment report dynamically created using the Geocortex Essentials reporting engine. As an added benefit, EPA administrators can leverage Geocortex Essentials Report Designer to modify the report template quickly and easily as requirements change.

“The development of an automated reporting tool was a big milestone,” explains Gavin Smith, Scientific Officer with EPA, “and this has helped SEA users save up to three hours per investigation.

” With the success of the SEA viewer and general ease with which other web-GIS applications can be built and managed using Geocortex Essentials, the EPA has already begun building other applications. An Unregulated Landfill Risk Assessment web-GIS tool has been deployed with the aim of automating risk ranking of unregulated waste disposal sites across Ireland. In addition, an Assimilative Capacity web-GIS tool is under development that will allow EPA to more effectively determine the capacity of water bodies to receive a discharge at any point in a river network.

"The EPA intends to upgrade its existing public and internal web-GIS sites from ArcIMS to ArcGIS Server, with Geocortex Essentials operating as the management framework at the application tier," notes Smith.

This approach puts the EPA on a growth path to leverage next-generation technology today and build better, more efficient applications to solve increasingly complex environmental problems across Ireland. Given the importance of the EPA’s mandate, their renewed technology direction will ensure protection and improvement of the natural environment for present and future generations while effectively meeting today’s business requirements given general resource constraints.

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