Web Application Development

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.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have partnered to create the Surface Disturbance Analysis and Reclamation Tracking Tool (SDARTT). SDARTT is to be the national repository for and analysis tool of disturbance data pertaining to public land operations for the BLM. Users will upload disturbance and reclamation data to SDARTT to map, analyze, and...

ScienceBase provides a number of features that scientists can use to build data collections, share data through web services, and ensure these data are preserved for use by future researchers. The project involves core research on linked open data, vocabularies, repository services, security, code management, and handling of large datasets. ScienceBase addresses not only data integration...

Information Science staff help the Climate Adaptation Science Centers with a variety of project and data management activities, including storing, managing, and distributing datasets; building and maintaining metadata; discovering datasets; and delivering their data and metadata as web services through various tools. These tools allow researchers to track projects, and the data that results from...