Best Practices

We propose a summit for USGS and Tribal nation partners to share critical knowledge of past and future flooding. The summit will build on USGS research investigating changing flood conditions, improve access to flood information, and aid in building climate resilient communities.

This project leverages the USGS's photo archive and Structure from Motion algorithms to derive historical elevation and geomorphic data to catalyze a long-term landscape change analysis of a conservation area. We propose to create a best practices workflow and establish suitable accuracy metrics.

Wildfires are increasing across the western U.S., causing damage to ecosystems and communities. Addressing the fire problem requires understanding the trends and drivers of fire, yet most fire data is limited only to recent decades. Tree-ring fire scars provide fire records spanning 300-500 years, yet these data are largely inaccessible to potential users. Our project will deliver the newly compil

Drought is a major problem in the American Southwest that is expected to worsen under the effects of climate change. Currently, the Southwest Biological Science Center is monitoring the effects of drought with soil moisture probes in a range of ecosystems across an elevational gradient on the Colorado Plateau. These data are used in multiple studies to analyze the effects of drought on vegetation

The purpose of this study is to understand how the USGS is using decision support, learning from successes and pitfalls in order to help streamline the design and development process across all levels of USGS scientific tool creation and outreach. What should researchers consider before diving into tool design and development? Our goal is to provide a synthesis of lessons learned and best practice

A unique opportunity for USGS to collaborate with IRIS-PASSCAL (the national seismic instrument facility) has presented itself to develop a geophysical data archive format that follows FAIR principles. IRIS-PASSCAL is extending facility to include magnetotelluric (MT) instruments prescribing the need for them to archive collected MT data by extending their existing protocol. Concurrently, Congre

We are working to incorporate environmental DNA (eDNA) data into the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species (NAS) database, which houses over 570,000 records of nonindigenous species nationally, and already is used by a broad user-base of managers and researchers regularly for invasive species monitoring. eDNA studies have allowed for the identification and biosurveillance of numerous invasive and threaten

The cloud offers new and exciting opportunities for USGS employees to leverage computing resources and services that can quickly improve their workflows and reduce expenditures typically associated with establishing a comparable environment with physical infrastructure. However, due to the novelty of access to and use of the cloud environment, there is limited documentation and shared examples det

Increasingly, USGS scientists seek to share and collaborate while working on data and code. Furthermore, these scientists often require advanced computing resources. Jupyter Notebooks are one such tool for creating these workflows. The files are interactive, code “notebooks” which allow users to combine code and text in one document, enabling scientists to share the stories held within their data...

FAIR is an international set of principles for improving the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of research data and other digital products. The PIs for this CDI project planned and hosted a workshop of USGS data stakeholders, data professionals, and managers of USGS data systems from across the Bureau’s Mission Areas. Workshop participants shared case studies that foste...

Environmental DNA (eDNA) testing allows for high sensitivity monitoring efforts of cryptic species in large, remote systems and is performed by investigating water and soil samples for sloughed DNA. Having access to eDNA datasets across multiple taxa and ecosystems is necessary for improved coordination among researchers and management. Additionally, quality control protocols are needed to vet inc

Over the past 40 years the National Wildlife Health center has collected wildlife health information from around the U.S. and beyond, amassing the world’s largest repository of wildlife-disease surveillance data. This project identified, characterized, and documented NWHC’s locally stored wildlife health datasets, a critical first step to migrating them to new laboratory- and public-facing data s