by Matthew Cimitile

A team led by geologist Chris Reich of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, received the poster award for "Best Data or Software Integration" at The National Map Users Conference and USGS Geographic Information Science (GIS) Workshop, held May 10-13, 2011, in Golden, Colorado. Their poster describes the St. Petersburg center's Core Archive Portal, a Web site in the final stages of development that will give users access to information about the largest coral core repository in the USGS.

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The title of the award-winning poster is "St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center's Core Archive Portal," and the authors are Matthew Streubert, Brendan Dwyer, Chris Reich, Meg Godbout, Adis Muslic, and Daniel Umberger.

The goal of The National Map Users Conference and USGS GIS Workshop was to enhance communication and collaboration among National Map users and contributors and to promote advancement of GIS and related technologies within the USGS community. The workshop included both lecture sessions and hands-on sessions that allowed participants to explore new software and databases.

"The conference serves as an awareness of where other centers are in GIS development. You get a taste of the GIS that is happening in the centers nationwide," said Streubert, a geospatial analyst/database developer for the USGS in St. Petersburg. "There is always the hope that someone sees what you are doing and applies it to what they are doing, so you develop similar methods, and with similar methods you can work together. If you have people working together on a common code or product that you are using, it is much easier to transfer data between centers and create across-the-board similarities."