Making Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Data Available to USGS Scientists and the Public

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 capability. The goal is to make UAS datasets available over the Internet to the USGS, DOI, and public science communities by establishing robust data management strategies and integrating these data with other geospatial datasets in the existing infrastructure located at the USGS EROS Data Center.



Principal Investigator : Jennifer A Lacey, Raad A Saleh

Cooperator/Partner : Jeff L Sloan, Bruce K Quirk

Accomplishments

The accomplishments for this project were as follows:

• The Long-Term Archive (LTA) project developed a data management plan that encompasses the definitions and structure needed for the various product types within UAS projects and metadata requirements as well as for providing services for electronic and (or) media deliveries (see attachment).
• The LTA designed a database, developed a data ingest process, and released five UAS product types through EarthExplorer.  The data ingest capabilities created for this USGS CDI grant establish the framework for future UAS product deliverables with a pathway to end users that need access to the UAS datasets in a timely manner.   The LTA UAS capability released in September 2015 supports the following data products: orthophotography, photos, point cloud, videos, and supporting documents.

Note:  This description is from the Community for Data Integration 2015 Annual Report.