GeoEFM Support

The mission of the Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC) is to serve as the USACE Center of Expertise in the technical areas of surface and groundwater hydrology, river hydraulics and sediment transport, hydrologic statistics and risk analysis, reservoir system analysis, planning analysis, real-time water control management and a number of other closely associated technical subjects. HEC's primary goal is to support the nation in its water resources management responsibilities by increasing USACE's technical capability in hydrologic engineering and water resources planning and management. In addition to supporting USACE along with Division and District Offices, HEC provides technical support to the Corps overseas missions to include Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, HEC provides services to other Federal, state, local and international agencies engaged in these technical areas. The primary way HEC accomplishes this mission is by developing state-of-the-art software tools bringing them to state-of-the practice that are reliably used by water resources engineers and planners. Since its inception in 1964, HEC has been developing and integrating software tools that support the water resources computing requirements for Corps field offices, headquarters, laboratories, and other Federal, state and international agencies. Over the last 54 years, the software created by HEC has been developed in many software programing languages. Currently, the majority of the coding is done in the Java programming language, but portions also include Fortran, C/C++, Visual Basic.NET, Python, and Visual Basic for ArcObjects. HEC-GeoEFM supports a diverse set of tasks related to USACE water management, ecosystem restoration, and natural resource management missions. Key capabilities include management of connections between EFM and GeoEFM projects, habitat suitability indices, consideration of habitat quantity and quality, tabulation of total and suitable habitat areas, raster calculators, spatial statistics, habitat raster splicing, habitat connectivity, and habitat functionality. HEC-GeoEFM provides critical information for making decisions that are fundamental in achieving the full range of benefits of the authorized purposes of Corps projects. HEC-GeoEFM incorporates state-of-the-art modeling techniques such as raster reclassification, watershed-scale statistical visualizations, carrying capacity, patch analyses, and macro-, meta-, and micro-scale habitat assessments. GeoEFM development began in 2007. At that time, ESRI had recently released ArcGis 9.2 and was actively working on 9.3. GeoEFM 1.0 was released in 2011. GeoEFM 1.0 install packages were made and publically shared for ArcMap versions 9.3 (released by ESRI in 2008), 9.3.1 (2009), and 10.0 (2010). GeoEFM software and install were subsequently updated and shared for ArcMap 10.1 after that software was released in 2012. Work on GeoEFM 2.0 began in late 2012. There were two primary phases of development. The first focused on new GeoEFM features related to spatial statistics (i.e., geo-locating and display of EFM statistical results) and splicing of habitat maps (i.e., combining habitat maps of different parts of a stream network into a single habitat mosaic). The second focused on habitat suitability indices (i.e., user creation, application, and display of habitat quality considerations) and patch tool options (i.e., habitat functionality features related to the distribution, amount, and quality of habitat available spatially). All GeoEFM 2.0 development was performed for ArcMap 10.1. The latest build of GeoEFM 2.0 was made in October 2017. Testing revealed issues with the software that precluded its release and GeoEFM maintenance paused due to lack of available funding. Performance of the contract must be completed by a firm that has extensive software development skills with an emphasis on geospatial analysis, including knowledge of environmental and water resources spatial analysis tools. This skill set needs to include knowledge of spatial analysis in the context of the USACE (United States Army Corps of Engineers) mission requirements for hydrologic simulation, statistical analysis, and 1D and 2D hydraulic simulation, and a high level of knowledge and experience with the software code utilized for this work. The firm's professional staff of geographers, engineers, mathematicians, and computer programmers will need to possess the geospatial analysis, ecosystem functions and and programming skill set needed to support HEC-GeoEFM, including knowledge of hydrology, statistical analysis, and related numerical solution algorithms, and possess over ten years of experience in geospatial evaluation, simulation and software development. The HEC-GeoEFM software team has developed over 200,000 lines of total code. Due to both developmental demands and staff limitations, it occasionally becomes incumbent upon HEC to contract for highly specialized services to assist in software devolvement or refinement of specific software applications. Only one firm exists which possess the intersection of geospatial analysis, ecosystems functions and software development knowledge and sophistication required to fully appreciate the interrelated connectivity of the hundreds of thousands lines of code and the inter-relationship of the various ecological software which HEC develops and makes available to others for use.