Web Mapping Application for a Historical Geologic Field Photo Collection Completed

Geotagged photographs have become a useful medium for recording, analyzing, and communicating Earth science phenomena. Despite their utility, many field photographs are not published or preserved in a spatial or accessible format—oftentimes because of confusion about photograph metadata, a lack of stability, or user customization in free photo sharing platforms. After receiving a request to release about 1,210 geotagged geological field photographs of the Grand Canyon region, we set out to publish and preserve the collection in the most robust (and expedient) manner possible (fig. 6). We leveraged and reworked existing metadata, JavaScript, and Python tools and developed a toolkit and proposed workflow to display the photograph collection in an interactive web mapping application populated from ScienceBase. The open-source tools generated from this project can be used as a pathway for making large collections of photographs available on ScienceBase and in web mapping applications. The proposed workflow could serve as a starting point for a USGS photograph publishing process.



Principal Investigator : Sarah E Nagorsen

Co-Investigator : Jason T Sherba

Cooperator/Partner : Drew A Ignizio, Christopher E Soulard