Grant funded work
A grant, and the fire season behind it.
The Oregon UAS Accelerator's Innovation Challenge awarded UASWFC grant funding in 2026. This is the work it supports: a free, standard way to get a drone's infrared map off a pilot's memory card and in front of the crews on a fire, the same way on every incident.
What we built
From a repository to a fire season.
The pipeline's first commit is dated March 20, 2026. UAS Wildland Fire Collaborative was incorporated as an Oregon nonprofit public benefit corporation on May 5, 2026, and recognized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity that month. On May 21 the site and the pilot portal went into production, and the system was open to pilots outside the founder's own company.
The first fire through the automated pipeline was East Evans Creek, Division Y, on July 22, 2026. The first map set delivered by an outside agency pilot came the next day: the Oregon Department of Forestry South Cascade District's sheet for Division X of the same fire, drawn on that district's own map template and approved by the pilot who flew it.
What followed, in the order it shipped: an intake for crewed infrared aircraft that needs no file upload at all (July 21); live layer control, so a pilot flying a fire night after night can take an older night off the feed an incident commander reads (August 4); Map a fire, which turns a flight's photos into a standards shaped shapefile bundle in a browser tab, with nothing to install (August 5); a live video feed a pilot creates once and texts to an incident commander who has no account with anyone (August 18); a public data page agency GIS shops open with no login (August 23); and the finished map sets published to uaswfc.org/ftp, in the shape the interagency share uses, folder tree and filenames alike (August 28).
The season, counted
A public record, not a projection.
Nothing on this page is a forecast. The 2026 season is in the public archive, file by file, and anyone can download it without an account or an email address. The nine written up fires, with the delivered sheets themselves, are on the case studies.
The Collaborative has no payroll. Eli Polsky has built and run the system without pay since 2024, and grants and gifts are what keep the maps free to the fires that need them.
- Fires in the public archive
- 11
- Nights of finished maps
- 76
- Files anyone can download
- 876
- Submissions processed
- 177
The program, for context
The Oregon UAS Accelerator.
The Oregon UAS Accelerator is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Pendleton and one of Oregon's Centers of Innovation Excellence, funded in part by grants from Business Oregon and the Oregon Lottery. Its Innovation Challenge backs young unmanned systems, robotics and advanced air mobility organizations with mentorship, access to real testing environments and non dilutive funding support.
UASWFC presented the pipeline at the program's pitch challenge in April 2026 and received grant funding through the Innovation Challenge. The Accelerator selected 34 organizations for that year's cohort, its third and largest. No ownership changed hands and no investor came with it, which is what the program means by non dilutive.