Computational Tools and Services

The goal of this project is to improve the USGS National Earthquake Information Center’s (NEIC) earthquake detection capabilities through direct integration of crowd-sourced earthquake detections with traditional, instrument-based seismic processing. During the past 6 years, the NEIC has run a crowd-sourced system, called Tweet Earthquake Dispatch (TED), which rapidly detects earthquakes worldwide

Legacy data (n) - Information stored in an old or obsolete format or computer system that is, therefore, difficult to access or process. (Business Dictionary, 2016) For over 135 years, the U.S. Geological Survey has collected diverse information about the natural world and how it interacts with society. Much of this legacy information is one-of-a-kind and in danger of being lost forever through d

Prior to this project, data acquired from the USGS Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have been provided to requesting scientists but have not been made available to the broader USGS community, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) bureaus, or the public at large. This project performed a pilot study and developed a strategy that is scalable to evolve into a permanent UAS data management capabili

This project team developed a Web-hosted application (that can also be used on mobile platforms) for automatic analysis of images of sediment for grain-size distribution, using the “Digital Grain Size” (DGS) algorithm of Buscombe (2013) (“DGS-Online,” 2015). This is a free, browser-based application for accurately estimating the grain-size distribution of sediment in digital images without any ma

ScienceCache is a scientific geocaching mobile application framework that targets two user groups for citizen science data collection: youth and geocachers. By melding training and games into the hunt for place-based data collection sites and incorporating photo uploads as data and authentication, new volunteers can collaborate in robust data collection. Scientists build a project on the administr

The purpose of this project was to support the enhanced search, access, and visualization capability for disaster maps and other contributed products on the public USGS Hazards Data Distribution System (HDDS) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2015). These products are often provided to USGS by collaborators for sharing across the response community during the course of an emergency event response; however,

The purpose of this project was to test and develop first-generation biological data integration and retrieval capabilities for the Water Quality Portal (National Water Quality Monitoring Council, [n.d.]) using the Water Quality Exchange (WQX) data exchange standard (Environmental Information eXchange Network, 2016). The Water Quality Portal (Portal) is a significant national water data distributi

Science is an increasingly collaborative endeavor. In an era of Web-enabled research, new tools reduce barriers to collaboration across traditional geographic and disciplinary divides and improve the quality and efficiency of science. Collaborative online code management has moved project collaboration from a manual process of email and thumb drives into a traceable, streamlined system where code

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 Engineers, 201

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 and make th

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 the BPD (htt

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 USG