Utah is growing fast, drying out, and sitting on mineral resources the country suddenly wants. The agencies that manage the state’s land, water and wildlife are the ones expected to say what that means, and the answers depend entirely on the quality of the data underneath them.
This session brings together four Utah agencies doing that work. Speakers cover statewide water planning and conservation modeling, the first authoritative inventory of the state’s significant mine waste features, thermal UAV surveys that track subsurface coal seam fires before they ignite something above ground, and the rebuild of hundreds of siloed datasets into a standardized cloud ecosystem. Alongside the technical work, speakers address the realities of public sector geospatial practice, including limited budgets, legacy records, accuracy standards that public data has to meet, and keeping a small team functional under heavy demand.
This session will include the following presentations:
Mapping Utah’s Water Future
Presented by Aaron Austin, Utah DNR / Division of Water Resources
Faced with rapid population growth and climate variability, the Utah Division of Water Resources relies heavily on a deeply integrated GIS Team in the Data & Innovation Section to plan, conserve, develop, and protect Utah’s water resources. This presentation provides a comprehensive update on how Water Resources leverages an Esri Enterprise Agreement, cloud infrastructure, and advanced remote sensing to tackle complex hydrologic challenges including, but not limited to, issues like historic drought, the Great Salt Lake, and the Colorado River.
Attendees will gain behind-the-scenes insights into major statewide initiatives, including spatial modeling for the Great Salt Lake Basin Integrated Plan (BIP), population disaggregation for culinary water suppliers, and high-impact automation like the Lawn Watering Guide. We will showcase how Water Resources employs advanced tools like Google Earth Engine, GRIDET, and Airborne Snow Observatories (ASO) lidar data. Finally, the presentation will touch on the operational side of managing a high-performing GIS team, highlighting strategies to balance workloads and prevent burnout.
Statewide Inventory of Utah’s Significant Mine Waste Features
Presented by Claire Decker, Utah Geologic Survey
The Utah Geological Survey (UGS) is elevating Utah’s geological leadership by delivering foundational data infrastructure that reduces exploration risk, attracts investment and drives long-term wealth and job creation for Utah. Technological advances, national security and energy independence goals are some of the driving factors of increased demands for critical and energy related minerals. UGS published a Statewide Inventory of Utah’s Significant Mine Waste Features. This data series is an authoritative baseline and a first step in a linear sequence of downstream operations in the mining industry. This non-biased pre-competitive data is acessible to all and intended to provide insights to inform scientific, economic, environmental stewardship and policy discussions. There is growing interest in reprocessing existing mine waste and extracting these important resources which can reduce the need to open new mines.
Mapping Coal Seam Fires
Presented by Aaron Brown, Utah Dept of Natural Resources
Subsurface coal seam and coal refuse pile fires present severe environmental and safety hazards, capable of migrating undetected and igniting secondary wildfires. Monitoring these events can be exceptionally difficult due to dangerous terrain and toxic atmospheric conditions. To mitigate risks to personnel, this project utilizes Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with thermal infrared sensors to track fire movement and map surface temperatures. Aerial surveys are strategically conducted one to two times per year during colder months to maximize the thermal contrast between the ambient environment and subsurface hotspots. The resulting thermal data is integrated into offline digital maps, providing ground crews with critical situational awareness to avoid hazardous voids and active hotspots. This proactive monitoring framework demonstrates how seasonal thermal drone deployments can significantly enhance safety and data collection in highly volatile post-mining environments.
Architecting a Unified Spatial Data Ecosystem in Google Cloud
Presented by Tyler Stratman, Utah Division of Wildlife
This session highlights a data management strategy within the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources that took a siloed data archipelago of hundreds of datasets and transformed it into a spatially-enabled, standardized, AI-ready, data ecosystem built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). After realizing the cultural and financial costs of externally managed data solutions, the agency pivoted to build their own modular data ecosystem. This session will touch on the rigorous standardization pipelines, AI-assisted data exploration, security practices, infrastructure, and the management strategy that allows it to be ready for agentic AI. Alongside that, we will focus on how this DIY approach fundamentally upskills internal teams, empowering them to perform their best without technical clutter. By highlighting BigQuery’s spatial capabilities, we will explore the technical architecture required to integrate this cloud infrastructure with Esri technologies, walking through the entire lifecycle of spatial data collected across various agencies and schemas. In doing so, we will look at what it takes to bring structural knowledge back in-house and engineer a cultural shift in data management.
