How They Helped Me Make My Esri User Conference Map Impactful
Esri Community’s "How They Helped Me" series features members sharing meaningful professional accomplishments and how those were made possible by assistance from others on the platform. These stories illuminate the often unrecognized threads of connection between Esri Community users and the impact that knowledge sharing can have on others around the world.
Each year, I submit a map to the Esri User Conference. This year’s map focuses on September 12th, 2024, in Scottsdale, Arizona when the Scottsdale Fire Department had to battle two large fires that broke out within 25 minutes of each other.
On an average day, the Scottsdale Fire Department handles over 100 calls but due to the size and scope of the fires that day, the regional Automatic Aid System ensured uninterrupted life-saving services and emergency response during a time of high demand of equipment and personnel placed on Scottsdale Fire.
Scottsdale Fire Department is a core member agency of a regional Automatic Aid dispatch system. Managed by the Phoenix and Mesa Regional Dispatch Centers, this system spans more than 2,000 square miles of the Phoenix metropolitan area, surrounding cities and counties, and connects over two dozen fire departments.
Automatic Aid eliminates municipal boundaries and provides for an orderly and reliable incident command structure. This enables dispatchers to send the closest available unit with the right resources for each emergency incident. This system saves critical response time for 9-1-1 calls. It also allows dispatchers to deploy additional resources to cover large incidents and to provide coverage when multiple emergency events occur.
The regional automatic aid system responded with equipment and personnel from all over the Phoenix metro area and helped cover the large fires as well as 30 other calls for service while the Scottsdale Fire Department was stretched thin.
Using ArcGIS Pro, I mapped the responses using Origin-Destination links showing the home station of the equipment and personnel and the incident they responded to.
My challenge was that I wanted to make my map showing the origin-destination links on that day look more like 3-D flight paths as I thought this effect might not only look more cartographically appealing but also add some gravity to how the Automatic Aid system works to bring in resources from all over the area served by the system.
I spent a lot of time experimenting and struggling with the 3-D depictions of the origin-destination links until I found a post on Esri Community titled, “How to draw a 3D arc (flight path) in ArcGIS Pro?” created by @NickShannon from 2018 that showed an image exactly like what I was trying to do.
This image gave me hope that what I was trying to do was possible. In the forum post there was some mention about creating the desired effect manually but I was not able to conceptually follow the process and wanted to do it programmatically if possible.
Further down in the post, in 2024, another member, @HeathAnderson said he was looking into the original question. Seeing his post got me encouraged that there might be a solution to what I was looking to do and I asked Heath if he had found a solution. He said that he thought he had and shared this image of how he accomplished what I was trying to.
With this input from Heath, I was hopeful that I would soon be able to display the data the way I wanted. The next step was to see if he had any code that I could use, and Heath shared his entire Jupiter notebook showing what he had done to achieve the look I wanted.
I needed to work on the code a bit to get it to work for my situation, but Heath took me 90% of the way to where I wanted to be for my mapping efforts.
With the code he provided, I was able to create a 3-D path in an ArcGIS Pro Local Scene as shown below.
My Esri UC poster is now complete and has been submitted. In addition to the Esri submission, the poster also has been entered in the GISCI 2025 map contest. The results have already paid dividends beyond my initial intentions. Our Fire Chief requested that the poster was shared with his peer groups. Also, the Scottsdale Fire Department PIO has included the above image in a yearbook.
Without the help of the Esri Community and Heath Anderson in particular, I would not have been able to create the impactful 3-D depictions of ArcGIS Pro origin-destination links.
If you are attending the 2025 Esri UC, look for the final product shown in the image. You can also look for it in the online map gallery.
Have a story about how someone in Esri Community provided help you needed to achieve a meaningful GIS accomplishment or overcome a notable challenge? Let us know by emailing esricommunity@esri.com. Our team would love to explore your story as a future How They Helped Me feature!