First Response Archives

CalTopo Teams allows organizations to connect all their members in a single platform, promoting the seamless sharing of information. As CalTopo team accounts have been increasingly adopted by a wide variety of organizations (including search and rescue, wildland fire, SWAT teams, public land management groups, and guiding companies), we have seen a greater need for the ability to customize the platform for different use cases.

We’ve been working hard to improve team accounts and we are excited to announce the latest team account updates!

Sub-teams and Mutual Aid Incidents as seen on the team account admin page

First, there is a new feature available to all team accounts: Sub-Teams! Sub-teams allow you to organize your team membership into distinct groups that make sense for your organization. For example, a sheriff’s office may want to create specialty sub-teams (such as a canine sub-team, evidence sub-team, etc) to more accurately reflect their organizational structure. Individual members can be assigned to a single sub-team or multiple sub-teams, depending on their role in the organization.

You can also set visibility between sub-teams and the main team account. This allows you to control the flow of information, providing or restricting access to team or sub-team data as needed. For example, a sheriff’s office may want to provide a canine sub-team with upward visibility into the main team account, so that they can view maps for incidents that they are asked to respond to. However for an evidence sub-team, they may want to prevent any member who is not part of the sub-team from viewing evidence sub-team maps or data in order to protect any potentially sensitive information.

Check out the Sub-Teams page in our user guide to learn more about creating and managing sub-teams on your team account.

Second, Events are now called Mutual Aid Incidents and are no longer a separate tab on the team admin page. Sub-teams and mutual aid incidents (formerly called events) are essentially the same thing except mutual aid incidents (1) are temporary groups for responding to a large complex incident, (2) have an expiration date, and (3) can include people from outside your organization. For example, a search and rescue team that is coordinating a multi operational period search may create a mutual aid incident to rapidly onboard mutual aid from outside their team.

Check out the Mutual Aid Incidents (Formerly Events) page in our user guide for more information on how to create and manage a mutual aid incident.

Finally, you may notice that there is another new feature on the team account admin page called Collaboration. At a high level, Collaboration allows teams and organizations that frequently work together to create a shared workspace for sharing maps and data. For example, a fire department that often works with a sheriff’s office could create a shared workspace that they give the sheriff’s office access to. While the feature is live on the site (and you are welcome to play around with it), we aren’t quite ready to officially roll it out yet- we’ll save that for another blog post soon!

Not familiar with CalTopo Teams and want to learn more about how a team account could help your organization? Visit the CalTopo Teams page or email us at help@caltopo.com for more information.

First Responders: Display and monitor a subject’s location in your map with SMS

Update: This feature can only be created on the web version of the program at this time. You can not yet send the text from your mobile device.

Have you ever been talking to a lost person on the phone, but can’t get an accurate location for them? Have you had a subject tell you their coordinates, but it turns out they are in another state? How about a time when a patient is injured and finding them rapidly could make all the difference?

The recipient gets this screen after opening the link.

We’ve just added a new feature to team accounts that can help with all of those situations: SMS Locators. With this feature, you can quickly send a text to the missing person. Assuming that person has a smartphone with a cell signal, they can open a link that they receive in a text and send their location to a saved CalTopo map. Then anyone viewing that map can see the location of the user. The location will continue to update long as the user doesn’t close the page or leave cell service or turn off their device. Through the whole process, you never have to leave SARTopo/CalTopo.

This is a huge feature for helping to find missing persons, or to help responders navigate to a scene without delay. It can also potentially be used to locate a lost party, then verbally guide them out, all the while watching their progress in real time on your map. This could mean you don’t have to deploy teams to resolve a situation, perhaps instead talking the subject through their own rescue.

All members of a team account with a data connection can see the location of the lost or injured person, so each responder can navigate directly to that person without entering coordinates into their device by hand. Each responder can see their own location as well as that of the subject.

Additionally, this is all done within the CalTopo app, so responders benefit from the many other features of using CalTopo, such as satellite imagery, parcel data, and roads and trails on a variety of different base layers. Plus team leaders can view the location of all of their responders at the same time and on the same map.

To use this new feature, you must 1.) be a part of a team account subscription, and 2.) be working from a saved map. As long as these conditions are met, you can go to +Add, choose “locator”, then choose SMS locator.

Once you’ve sent the text and the subject opens the link, you’ll start to get a track.

View the subject’s track live in your map.

Additional information for the status of the locator is available, so you can see that the link has been activated, when the last update took place, and even send another message to the user (it’s a one way system though.)

Here’s where things really get useful: any team member can open the same map via the mobile app, and navigate to the subject. Here we see a mobile app user finding the app track in the map items list. In the next image, the app user has their location turned on and is pointing more or less in the direction of the sms user.