Nova

Nova is cloud-based mapping software built by former wildland firefighters for fire, emergency-response, law-enforcement and land-management teams that need usable maps from aerial data without a GIS specialist on staff.

Users upload or live-stream imagery from drones (the provider also names helicopters and planes). Nova stitches it into orthomosaics and digital elevation models and lets teams mark up maps in shared workspaces. Paid add-ons cover Live Stream, Hotspots (AI detection of heat in thermal imagery) and Colorfinder for search and rescue. Outputs export as georeferenced PDF maps and as KML, KMZ, SHP, CSV and TIFF files, and can be sent to Avenza, CalTopo and SARTopo, ATAK and TAK servers, ArcGIS Online, Tablet Command and First Due. A Processing API lets customers create flights, upload imagery and retrieve orthomosaics and hotspot detections (GeoTIFF, XYZ tiles, GeoJSON) programmatically.

The web app also brings in satellite data: its Satellite tool lets the user draw an area, pick a date and process a mosaic from Copernicus Sentinel-2 (visual at 10 m, shortwave infrared at 20 m) or Sentinel-1 radar (30 m). Map overlays add NASA FIRMS active-fire detections from MODIS and VIIRS, fire perimeters and fire-danger ratings for the US and Canada, ASTER elevation and EUMETSAT geostationary imagery.

Nova publishes a free Lite plan, a Pro plan at US$100 per month billed annually and custom Enterprise plans. It states SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and offers data storage in the US or Canada, or hosting on the customer's own servers. Named users include CAL FIRE, the Los Angeles Fire Department and the British Columbia Wildfire Service.