The FORT Web Applications Team: Who We Are

The FORT Web Apps Team is a group of application software and systems specialists, programmers, business analysts, technical writers, and other IT specialists who design, develop, and deploy Web-based applications for natural resource scientists and managers. Clients and partners can use these products to collect, integrate, and report data on their science and management activities.

The Web Apps Team is part of the USGS-U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Joint Development Team (JDT). The JDT was formed by an interagency agreement between the USGS and the FWS that allows the bureaus to share contract staff and physical IT resources. This offers several advantages:

• The combined effect of the team members' diverse talents and experiences generates new ideas, encourages different approaches to identifying and solving problems, and builds expertise to enable needed specialization and technological advances.


• Shared staffing provides the flexibility to adjust for production schedules and other customer needs.


• Shared hardware, software licenses, and computer support reduces infrastructure costs.

The Web Apps Team comprises federal employees and a large team of contract professionals from the JDT that directly support the USGS and its customers, including the U.S. Department of the Interior and several of its agencies (Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

What We Do

The Web Apps Team specializes in putting together custom standards-based, open-source component projects to build applications that serve a specific science or management need (see "Links to Secure Applications"). This original work also involves building and supporting secure environments, including collaboration environments, where USGS scientists and partners can access and interact with distributed databases, files, and one another. The Team's products fall into three overlapping and often interdependent categories of products and services:

• Management and Decision Tools: Specific Web-based applications for the USGS, DOI, and other natural resource partners.


• Collaborative Tools: Shared, secure environments within which science communities can correspond and share data and documents.


• Infrastructure: Robust, secure, Web-based environments for USGS that offer the speed and capacity to handle advanced and complex operations.