News Release

99-09

Fifth Annual Agatha Bystram Award Presented to Natural Resources Canada's Fire M3 Team

Ottawa, November 1, 1999 -- Roch Carrier, National Librarian and Chair of the Council of Federal Libraries (CFL), announced today that the 1999 winner of the CFL's Agatha Bystram Award for Leadership in Information Management is the Fire Monitoring, Mapping and Modelling System (Fire M3) design team. Led by Bryan Lee, Research Officer of the Canadian Forest Service, the team includes members from both the Canadian Forest Service and the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing.

"The jury was impressed with the way this project combined technology in an innovative manner to produce a range of entirely new products. The successful integration of satellite image technology with a Geographic Information System (GIS) and Web accessibility is a major technological accomplishment," said Mr. Carrier.

Fire M3 automatically monitors, maps and models large forest fires across Canada on a daily basis, transforming data from satellite images into accurate maps of forest fires. The maps are sent to fire agencies, the public and the media daily via the World Wide Web. The timeliness of the system allows users to react quickly to changing conditions, which enables better management of forest fires and could help save lives and prevent environmental damage.

The Awards luncheon, held November 1 during the 15th Annual Fall Seminar of the Council of Federal Libraries at the Château Laurier in Ottawa, was sponsored by EBSCO Canada Limited and Micromedia (main sponsors); and Carswell Thomson Professional Publishing; Geac Canada Limited; CEDROM-SNi; Faxon Canada, a RoweCom Company and Blackwell's Book Services.

Members of the 1999 Award jury were Dr. Marianne Scott, former National Librarian of Canada and Chair of the Council of Federal Libraries; Martin Foss, University Librarian, Carleton University; Vicki Whitmell, Executive Director, Canadian Library Association and Ivan Fellegi, Chief Statistician, Statistics Canada. The Fire M3 team was selected from among 18 nominations received for the 1999 Award.

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