Beyond the Drone Feed: The Next Evolution of Situational Awareness
Public safety agencies have made major progress in expanding situational awareness. Drone operations, live video, mobile mapping, and richer data feeds are giving dispatchers, commanders, and responders more visibility than ever before. That progress matters. In emergency response, earlier visibility can support faster decisions, stronger coordination, and safer outcomes.
But visibility alone is no longer the finish line.
The next challenge is turning visibility into decision advantage.
A drone feed may show a building, a perimeter, traffic patterns, smoke conditions, or crowd movement. A map may show the incident location. A CAD screen may show call details. Each of those tools adds value. But if they remain isolated, the response picture is still fragmented. Teams may see more without necessarily understanding more or acting faster.
Decision advantage comes when information is organized in a way that improves response.
That means situational awareness must become more than a collection of views. Responders need context to answer operational questions, such as: Where is the safest access point? Which side of the building aligns with the reported caller location? What floor may be involved? What route gets units there fastest? What hazards or constraints matter most?
This is where location intelligence becomes increasingly important.
A drone feed can provide overhead visibility, but it does not always tell commanders how to move from observation to action. The same is true of video feeds, sensor alerts, and responder apps. These tools become more valuable when they are tied to trusted map context, operational workflows, and common location reference points.
The public safety market is now entering a phase where technology will increasingly be judged not just by how much it shows, but by how much it helps teams decide and act.
That shift is especially important in complex incidents. School emergencies, dense urban environments, large public events, and incidents that move from outdoors to indoors all require more than passive visibility. They require information that helps reduce uncertainty and supports coordinated action.
Situational awareness is increasingly less about how much information can be displayed and more about how effectively that information supports decisions. The next evolution will be shaped by better-connected context that helps responders and commanders move more quickly from observation to action.
Technical Signals
Esri also outlined new ways to visualize change over time in ArcGIS Map Viewer. The examples include tundra swan migration, wildfire smoke and PM2.5, Hurricane Helene with stream gauges, and tidal changes around San Francisco Bay. The same temporal configurations can be carried over to ArcGIS Instant Apps and StoryMaps for reuse across public-facing applications.
AI is moving deeper into wildfire response, with researchers now testing systems that could help officials decide where to deploy crews when multiple fires are burning simultaneously. One approach models how fires may evolve over the next two weeks under different suppression levels, then recommends how limited crews could be allocated. The U.S. recorded 77,850 wildfires in 2025, above recent averages, increasing the pressure on officials to prioritize resources quickly.
Octave, the software business spun out of Hexagon in May, is doubling down on its OnCall public-safety platform as PSAPs move toward NG9-1-1. The company is building around cloud, managed services, AI, and the growing volume of data arriving from drones, IoT cameras, social media, and other connected systems. Its AI strategy keeps a human in the loop for final decisions, while using automation to streamline call-taker and dispatcher workflows and improve situational awareness.
Esri shared a new ArcGIS Pro workflow for creating terrain with a vintage, hand-drawn appearance. The method combines hillshade, curvature, surface parameters, and blend modes to add more texture and depth to elevation data. It can also be layered with imagery to produce more stylized basemaps without leaving ArcGIS Pro.
GIS Policy & Standards Watch
NENA opened a call for volunteers to revise APCO/NENA ANS 1.102.3.2020, the ECC Service Capability Criteria Rating Scale. The standard gives ECC managers and their governing authorities an assessment tool to objectively rate a center's preparedness, survivability, and sustainability against minimum, advanced, and superior capability tiers for both natural and man-made events. The prior 2020 revision added day-to-day operations criteria and updated survivability items based on field experience since the standard's original publication, and this cycle is recruiting subject matter experts to carry that update process forward.
NTIA says agencies should budget for materially higher recurring costs as they move from legacy 9-1-1 to NG9-1-1. Its latest cost study estimates NG9-1-1 systems could cost about 30% more per year to operate and maintain because spending shifts toward cloud services, SaaS, cybersecurity, AI, and integration. NTIA now estimates a nationwide NG9-1-1 deployment would require $5.8 billion to $9.27 billion, down from the $9.5 billion to $12.7 billion estimated in 2018, partly because state and local governments have already invested about $4.5 billion in the transition.
USGS released Version 2.0 of its Cooperative National Geologic Map, expanding standardized digital coverage to all 50 states and most U.S. territories. Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam are among the areas newly incorporated. Users can search geology by attributes such as age, material, and rock type, with the underlying data also available for download and through ArcGIS Online.
Insight of the Week
More than 3/4 of 9-1-1 calls now come from cell phones or VoIP, while landlines have fallen to about 7% nationally and below 5% in many states. The system, built in 1968 to trace fixed landline addresses, now depends on cell tower data that updates every 20 to 30 seconds and misidentifies the caller's tower an estimated 20% or more of the time, forcing telecommunicators to ask, "Where is your emergency?" to callers who often cannot answer. 38 states have pledged to transition to NextGen 9-1-1, a shift estimated to cost roughly $15 billion nationwide.
Resources & Events
Report Spotlight: Minimum Guidelines for Initial Public Safety Telecommunicator Training (National 911 Program)
A coalition of nine public safety organizations, including APCO, NENA, IAED, and NASNA, published updated minimum training guidelines for entry-level 9-1-1 telecommunicators, replacing the 2016 version. The guidelines cover 13 core training areas, from call processing and radio communications to disaster preparedness, and include a dedicated GIS section that covers mapping layers, CAD integration, and NG9-1-1 databases. For GIS coordinators supporting training programs, the document provides a baseline for what new telecommunicators should understand about the location data underlying their call-handling tools before they take a live call.
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