Computational Tools and Services

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This project created a mobile application to collect nationally consistent data of fish passage barriers in the United States to meet needs for hydrologic and ecological assessments and conservation planning decisions. Principal Investigator : David R Maltby, Andrea Ostroff Benefits Meets high priority need for hydrological and ecological assessments Data available to conservation...

2012 Updates (from the FY12 Annual Review) The NWIS Web Services Snapshot represents the next generation of data retrieval and management. The newest Snapshot tool allows instant access to NWIS data from four different web services through ArcGIS, software available to all USGS scientists in all mission areas. Increased data retrieval efficiency reduces the steps required to retrieve and...

The USGS provides many national, regional and local datasets for download, streaming interaction such as WFS/WCS, and analysis. Ultimately, most datasets are presented for visualization in "viewers" with basic navigation and interaction for inspection and even lightweight WebGIS like web service functions, annotations, etc. Many viewers–different APIs, clients, purposes, and niche...

This project developed a set of raster utility classes and layer types for inclusion in OpenLayers to allow for statistical analysis, manipulation, and additional rendering functionality for raster data sources. The deliverables are patches for the OpenLayers development branch that include the new functionality, examples and documentation to demonstrate its use, and comprehensive unit...