Alex Chainho

GNR Operational Officer

Nov 2005 - Present • 20 yrs 10 mos

Continuous operational service in Portugal's National Republican Guard since November 2005. Joined the GIPS Emergency Protection and Rescue Group in May 2006, serving in helicopter-transported wildfire-fighting teams before moving to the situation room to monitor and follow GIPS operational activity. Before 2011, I developed the reporting and data-handling capabilities needed in that environment: Excel reports with coordinate fields, consolidation of reports into other Excel data files, and VBA macros that converted records into KML files. Those processes created the first georeferenced GIPS data and connected field activity to a common operational picture. I continued in GIPS's successor, the UEPS, from 2018. This practical experience of field teams, command needs and real reporting constraints remains the basis for my technical work.

GIS Analyst & Automation Developer

Nov 2005 - Present • 20 yrs 10 mos

Since 2011, I have turned operational information needs into GIS systems and automation. I started with incident statistics and georeferencing from Excel reports containing coordinate fields, using VBA to consolidate data and create KML files. From 2014, the first operational platforms combined Excel and Google Earth; the workflows then moved to QGIS in 2017-2018, ArcMap from 2019, and later ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro. I began learning Python through short courses in 2022. From 2023, AI-assisted development enabled me to turn operational needs into my own tools more quickly. I now design and maintain national-scale GIS platforms for GNR units, including field data collection, automatic administrative and cadastral enrichment, real-time dashboards, map and report production, controlled data-sharing workflows, and Python pipelines. Current work includes authenticated REST API integrations, ArcGIS Online publishing, PDF, Excel and geographic exports, scheduled processes from every 10 minutes to weekly, risk and weather data pipelines, and the multi-agency CIPO work-monitoring programme. The focus is to replace repeatable manual work with reliable, documented systems that operators can use and maintain.