Cloud-based Applications and Data Processing

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

As one of the largest and oldest science organizations in the world, USGS has produced more than a century of earth science data, much of which is currently unavailable to the greater scientific community due to inaccessible or obsolescent media, formats, and technology. Tapping this vast wealth of “dark data” requires 1) a complete inventory of legacy data and 2) methods and tools to effectively

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...

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...

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

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

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