Lakeland Chosen For Worldwide Special Achievement Award

LAKELAND, FL —Out of more than 100,000 city nominations from around the world, Environmental Systems Research Institute chose Lakeland as one of 180 selected to receive a Special Achievement in Geographic Information System Award for Operation Awareness and Citizen Engagement Solutions, the city said on its website. A geographic information system is a computer system for capturing, storing, checking and displaying data related to positions on Earth's surface.

“During the last six months the city of Lakeland has been earning GIS industry accolades and recognition that has been building for years, and we are very pleased to be selected to receive a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award by ESRI, the industry leader in GIS solutions," said Tracy Kirkpatrick, Geographic Information System Manager.

Staff members of the city designed public facing dashboards that helped manage disaster needs during Hurricane Irma, and they inform citizens of traffic conditions through a traffic dashboard that they connected to the app, Waze.

One of the newest dashboards focuses on the number of coronavirus cases in Lakeland. Residents can view on the dashboard map how many residents in Lakeland have been diagnosed with coronavirus. Or if they only want to see how many in their zip code has been diagnosed then they have that option as well.

It also gives the option to view how many coronavirus-related emergency room visits have occurred in Polk County along with other coronavirus related information pertaining to the area. Another creative viewing option provided on the dashboard map is a Twitter section called City of Lakeland — COVID-19 Twitter Dashboard that shows the most up to date tweets by Florida Division of Emergency Management, Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida Department of Health, FEMA Region 4 and Center for Disease Control.

The city also uses Environmental Systems Research Institute to help disseminate business information to provide a better window into daily workflows including a dashboard to help identify utility outages.