Mission

Provide access to consistent, and nationally available point based structure inventories with attribution to support evaluation of consequences from natural and man-made hazards.

Vision

To support all federal agencies interested in collaborating on structure inventory data,

Goals

  1. Provide access to the data to as many people and agencies as possible.
  2. Improve the quality of the data.
  3. Improve the ability for the U.S. to respond to disasters.
  4. Improve the ability for the U.S. to plan for future disasters.

Purpose

The National Structure Inventory (NSI) provides a base dataset of national coverage of structure points with attributes with consistent quality. The purpose of the NSI databases is to facilitate the assessment and analysis of natural hazards. The NSI describes the exposure and vulnerability of the structures of the nation with each point attempting to represent a single structure. Pairing this inventory with hazard information provides a means to evaluate consequences of natural hazards. Flood damage analysis has been the primary usage, but sufficient data exists on each structure to compute damages due to other hazard types.

Background of the National Structure Inventory

Around 2008 USACE began a new process for screening dams which included developing structure inventories for each dam in the USACE portfolio. Similar processes were added to the Levee Screening Tool. At that time for each project a new inventory was created and reviewed by a cadre member. In 2010 USACE began the process of the Corps Water Management Systems National Implementation plan; during the discussions of the evaluation of the budget for that project there were suggestions that USACE should build a single structure inventory for the nation and pull from that inventory for each project in the CWMS National Implementation.

From that meeting, the National Structure Inventory was conceived. The first version of the NSI was built in 2011 based largely on the HAZUS database and the 2000 census. In 2016 the second NSI was generated based on the updated HAZUS database and the 2010 census. In 2019 the third NSI (referred to as NSI 2.0) was developed based on parcel data, building footprints, and the 2010 census with the ACS updates. Currently, NSI 2022 is the most recent dataset and it is available for public consumption. While the USACE base data layer was created to simplify the GIS pre-processing workflow for the USACE Modeling Mapping and Consequence center, the data has gone on to see use in a variety of USACE, FEMA, and other agency applications.

The NSI is a repository of point structure inventories with a structured RESTful API service, and the inventory contains a series of required attributes or fields that describe each point in the inventory.