Computational Tools and Services

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, which reduce

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, adoption has

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 be used t

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 by provi

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, news arti

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 at differe

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 information, as

The scientific legacy of the USGS is the data and the scientific knowledge derived from it gathered over 130 years of research. However, it is widely assumed, and in some cases known, that high quality data, particularly legacy data critical for large time-scale analyses such as climate change and habitat change, is hidden away in case files, file cabinets, and hard drives housed in USGS science c

As one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Geospatial Program, The National Map is a collaborative effort among the USGS and other Federal, State, and local partners to improve and deliver topographic information for the Nation. It has many uses ranging from recreation to scientific analysis to emergency response. The National Map is easily accessible for display on

The Fort Collins Science Center Web Applications Team, the Core Science Analytics and Synthesis unit of the Core Science Systems Mission Area, and a North Central Climate Science Center/NCAR/NOAA partnership group collaborated on a set of automated tools to allow remapping of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata standards to International Organization for Standardization (ISO) met

The Center for Biological Informatics (CBI, now reorganized into the Core Science Analytics and Synthesis unit of the Core Science Systems Mission Area) and the Fort Collins Science Center Web Applications Team joined resources to integrate their respective Metadata Tool and ScienceBase system: Incorporated the CBI-developed Metadata Tool into ScienceBase metadata workflow. This work involved dia

The CDI Upload, Registry and Access Project was added as a core capability to ScienceBase, a data integration system sponsored by Core Science Systems. The following description is the abstract from the 2012-3874 USGS Fact Sheet: "As a leading science and information agency and in fulfillment of its mission to provide reliable scientific information to describe and understand the Earth, the U.S.