Application Development

As part of the Values Mapping for Planning in Regional Ecosystems project, also known as VaMPIRE, USGS scientists are developing a public participatory GIS application that aids in gathering information about visitors’ values for public lands and waters.

The USGS, the BLM, the FWS, and the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies have developed of a new DOI-funded effort, known as SageDAT.

The USGS is developing science and decision support tools to inform policy and management decisions about various aspects of the energy development life cycle.

The Information Science Branch develops and applies approaches that integrate natural science, computer technology, and information management to address key natural resource issues. Branch staff work with USGS scientists and data managers to convert field observations into GIS-oriented data and metadata products. The Branch also supports ecological and landscape modeling, including the...

The USGS and partner agencies maintain millions of datasets in many thousands of collections. Designing systems to document, catalog, analyze, and distribute these datasets requires expert computer science skills coupled with close coordination of data generators and users. To support these efforts, the Information Science Branch developed project tracking web applications that help Centers manage...

Mobile technologies, from feature-laden phones to wearable computing devices, are changing the face of field research. Scientists are now able to track the movement of wildlife in near real time, capture more and various types of survey data conveniently, and discover critical information about a sample site prior to data collection. The Information Science Branch provides support for all of these...

Assembling data and presenting it in a meaningful way becomes increasingly important as natural resource issues span larger and larger geographic, political, organizational, and scientific boundaries. The Information Science Branch helps design, develop, and implement applications that allow USGS Centers, programs, and projects to securely store, document, integrate, and share datasets. These...

North American bats face unprecedented threats including habitat loss and fragmentation, white-nose syndrome, wind energy development, and climate change. However, it is difficult to evaluate the impacts of these threats due to a lack of basic information about the distribution and abundance of bats across the continent. Although bat monitoring has long been conducted in individual areas and for...

National observation and monitoring networks, regardless of their target observation type, share many common needs. Not the least of these needs is the data assembly framework employed by the network - the flow of many types of collected data into a common processing, analysis, and visualization engine. The Information Science Branch uses experiences from similar software and infrastructure...

True data integration across many databases and projects requires new thinking about the design of data collection and distribution applications. Working with multiple USGS partners, the Information Science Branch researched and designed a new approach to software development and deployment that maintains function-based containers connected by web services. This component approach provides...

Working with the Northern Rockies Science Center, the Information Science Branch designed and developed ScienceCache, a scientific geocaching mobile application framework. Initially developed for citizen science data collection, the application was extended to work for any field data collection effort. The lead researcher controls the data collection route, collection forms, and data repository...

The Information Science Branch developed a set of performance, security, and resiliency models to evaluate information architectures optimized for cloud hosting solutions.