All Funded Projects

The United States has over 2 million dams on rivers and streams (Graf, 1999), and more than 84,000 of the larger dams are documented in the congressionally mandated National Inventory of Dams (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2015). The average age of these National Inventory of Dams is 52 years; by the year 2030, over 80 percent will be at least 50 years old (American Society of Civil...

The USGS National Land Cover Trends Project has the largest repository of field photos at the USGS (over 33,000 photos). Prior to CDI funding, Land Cover Trends had limited funding to make the national collection of photos available online for researchers, land managers, and citizens. The goal of this CDI project was to add geotags and keywords to the digital copies of each field photo...

The purpose of this project was to integrate the Bat Banding Program data (1932-1972) and the U.S. and Canada diagnostic data for white-nose syndrome with the USGS Bat Population Data (BPD) Project and provide the bat research community with secure, role-based access to these previously unavailable datasets. The objectives of this project were to: 1) integrate WNS diagnostic data into...

CDI helped fund development of the USGS Geo Data Portal in 2010. In 2012, CDI funded two projects to increase the functionality of the Geo Data Portal. The Resources section below contains links to the Geo Data Portal website and deliverables from the 2012 projects. Principal Investigator : David L Blodgett Description of the Geo Data Portal from the Geo Data Portal documentation home...

The purpose of this project is to improve the USGS Publications Warehouse (Pubs Warehouse) so that a person can search for USGS publications by geographic region in addition to existing search criteria; for example, one could search using map zooms or congressional districts. The addition of geographic searches allows users to narrow their search results to specific areas of interest...

Over the last few years, the ISO 19115 family of metadata standards has become the predominantly accepted worldwide standard for sharing information about the availability and usability of scientific datasets among researchers. The U.S. interests in the ISO standard have also been growing as global-scale science demands participation with the broader international community; however...

Large online data catalogs use controlled vocabularies to categorize datasets in ways that allow end users to sort and select data matching their needs. The eventual goal of this project is to build functional services so that the USGS Thesaurus and other USGS-controlled vocabularies will be available to the English-speaking scientific community, especially within the USGS where they can...

Note 9/22/18: The Adopt a Pixel concept has been incorporated into NASA's Globe Observer App (Land Cover Tool). Find out more and download the app at https://observer.globe.gov/. *** Adopt a Pixel-Data Infrastructure (AaP-DI) provides the basis for a new data acquisition system for ground reference data. These data will be used to complement existing and future remote sensing collections...

The U.S. network of 160 weather radars known as NEXRAD (NEXt generation RADar) is one of the largest and most comprehensive terrestrial sensor networks in the world. To date, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has archived about 2 petabytes data from this system. Although designed for meteorological applications, these radars readily detect the movements of birds, bats, and insects...

The national Nonindigenous Aquatic Species (NAS) Database Program serves as a repository for geo-referenced occurrence data on introduced aquatic organisms across the nation. The NAS Program, including the database and website (http://nas.er.usgs.gov), is a well-known resource and has been widely referenced in peer reviewed literature, agency reports, state and national management plans...

Digital Elevation Models (DEM) provide details of the earth’s surface and are used for visualization, physical modeling, and elevation change analysis. Creating DEMs in coastal environments is complicated by the highly ephemeral nature of the coast and the need to span the land-water interface. This requires merging multiple bathymetric and topographic datasets that have been collected...

People in the locality of earthquakes are publishing anecdotal information about the shaking within seconds of their occurrences via social network technologies, such as Twitter. In contrast, depending on the size and location of the earthquake, scientific alerts can take between two to twenty minutes to publish. The goals of this project are to assess earthquake damage and effects...