GFL Background

The principal goal of the GFP was to build and maintain a long-term record of data to support scientists and policy makers involved in that collaborative effort. At the inception of the Program, it was hoped that at some point - perhaps as much as twenty-five years into the future - the acquired data could be openly released to support future scientists and policy makers as well. Since the 1990s, the GFP has been periodically collecting images of environmentally significant sites around the world.

The Global Fiducials Library (GFL) is managed by the U.S. Geological Survey under the National Civil Applications Program, in partnership with the Civil Applications Committee. The GFL archive is dedicated to ensuring that images of these selected sites are collected, maintained and made available to scientists and policy makers in support of scientific investigations into global dynamic systems and change. Until recently, use of these data was limited to an intelligence environment. Now, in what constitutes a change in the programmatic time line, the goal of the GFP is to make this extensive collection of images publicly available. This has been accomplished through the generation of unrestricted imagery derived products provides a high value way to offer valuable select imagery products to the scientific community. Essentially, the GFP is a proactive effort to "plan ahead for hindsight."