Publications

If conservation of biodiversity is the goal, then the protected areas network of the continental US may be one of our best conservation tools for safeguarding ecological systems (i.e., vegetation communities). We evaluated representation of ecological systems in the current protected areas network and found insufficient representation at three vegetation community levels within lower...

The ability to augment local gravity surveys with additional gravity stations from easily accessible national databases can greatly increase the areal coverage and spatial resolution of a survey. It is, however, necessary to integrate such data seamlessly with the local survey. One challenge to overcome in integrating data from national databases is that these data are typically of...

The U.S. Geological Survey's Larry Moore provides an update on the US Topo effort, the Survey’s general purpose, digital, quadrangle map series. He outlines the successes thus far and the obstacles still ahead in 2013.

Executive Summary Core Science Systems is a new mission of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that resulted from the 2007 Science Strategy, “Facing Tomorrow’s Challenges: U.S. Geological Survey Science in the Decade 2007–2017.” This report describes the Core Science Systems vision and outlines a strategy to facilitate integrated characterization and understanding of the complex Earth...

Topographic data are designed and widely used for base maps of diverse applications, yet the power of these information sources largely relies on the interpretive skills of map readers and relational database expert users once the data are in map or geographic information system (GIS) form. Advances in geospatial semantic technology offer data model alternatives for explicating concepts...

The Digital Mapping Techniques '10 (DMT'10) workshop was attended by 110 technical experts from 40 agencies, universities, and private companies, including representatives from 19 State geological surveys (see Appendix A). This workshop, hosted by the California Geological Survey, May 16-19, 2010, in Sacramento, California, was similar in nature to the previous 13 meetings (see Appendix...

Elevation data are essential for hazards mitigation, conservation, infrastructure development, national security, and many other applications. Under the leadership of the U.S. Geological Survey and the member States of the National Digital Elevation Program (NDEP), Federal agencies, State agencies, and others work together to acquire high-quality elevation data for the United States and...

The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Vegetation Subcommittee, the Ecological Society of America Panel on Vegetation Classification, and NatureServe have worked together to develop the United States National Vegetation Classification (USNVC). The current standard was accepted in 2008 and fosters consistency across Federal agencies and non-federal partners for the description of...

The workshop is a tutorial on introductory geospatial semantics with hands-on exercises using standard Web browsers. The workshop is divided into two sections, general semantics on the Web and specific examples of geospatial semantics using data from The National Map of the U.S. Geological Survey and the Open Ontology Repository. The general semantics section includes information and...

Old geophysical surveys [pre–Global Positioning System (GPS)] stand as valuable, largely untapped sources of scientific data. If data from these surveys were in a format that had reasonable accuracy, availability, and ease of access, they could be more widely used. In this paper, a pre-GPS survey is integrated into a modern geographic database, in this case, The National Map (TNM). The...

Version 0.0 (1995), Dan Steinwand, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)/Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center (EDC)--Version 0.0 was a command line version for UNIX that required four arguments: the input metadata, the output metadata, the input data file, and the output destination path. Version 1.0 (2003), Stephen Posch and Michael P. Finn, USGS/Mid-Continent Mapping Center...

The development of linked data on the World-Wide Web provides the opportunity for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to supply its extensive volumes of geospatial data, information, and knowledge in a machine interpretable form and reach users and applications that heretofore have been unavailable. To pilot a process to take advantage of this opportunity, the USGS is developing an...