Skip to main content
Advanced Search

Filters: Tags: {"scheme":"https://www.sciencebase.gov/vocab/category/WRET/CMS_Topics/CDI_CMS_Topics"} (X) > Categories: Project (X)

Folder: ROOT ( Show direct descendants )

118 results (145ms)   

Location

Folder
ROOT
View Results as: JSON ATOM CSV
thumbnail
Over the past 40 years the National Wildlife Health center has collected wildlife health information from around the U.S. and beyond, amassing the world’s largest repository of wildlife-disease surveillance data. This project identified, characterized, and documented NWHC’s locally stored wildlife health datasets, a critical first step to migrating them to new laboratory- and public-facing data systems, such as the Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership-event reporting system. To accomplish this, we developed a systematic, standardized approach for collaborating with laboratory scientists to locate, define, and classify their long-term datasets so that they can be cleansed, archived, and mapped to new...
thumbnail
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 evaluate, prioritize, and preserve the data with the greatest potential impact to society. Recognizing these truths and the potential value of legacy data, USGS has been investigating legacy data management and preservation since 2006, including the 2016 “DaR” project, which developed legacy data inventory and evaluation...
thumbnail
In the mid-1800s, tile-drains were installed in poorly-drained soils of topographic lows as water management to protect cropland during wet conditions; consequently, estimations of tile-drain location have been based on soil series. Most tile drains are in the Midwest, however each state has farms with tile and tile-drain density has increased in the last decade. Where tile drains quickly remove water from fields, groundwater and stream water interaction can change, affecting water availability and flooding. Nutrients and sediment can quickly travel to streams thru tile, contributing to harmful algal blooms and hypoxia in large water bodies. Tile drains are below the soil surface, about 1 m deep, but their location...
thumbnail
Prior to this project, data acquired from the USGS Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have been provided to requesting scientists but have not been made available to the broader USGS community, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) bureaus, or the public at large. This project performed a pilot study and developed a strategy that is scalable to evolve into a permanent UAS data management capability. The goal is to make UAS datasets available over the Internet to the USGS, DOI, and public science communities by establishing robust data management strategies and integrating these data with other geospatial datasets in the existing infrastructure located at the USGS EROS Data Center. Principal Investigator : Jennifer...
The purpose of this project is to improve the USGS Publications Warehouse (Pubs Warehouse) so that a person can search for USGS publications by geographic region in addition to existing search criteria; for example, one could search using map zooms or congressional districts. The addition of geographic searches allows users to narrow their search results to specific areas of interest, which reduces the time required to sift through all results outside the area of interest. In FY 2014, the project team determined that the ScienceBase Footprint Studio would be an appropriate tool for creating the footprints for USGS publications and decided on the technical implementation for information exchange between ScienceBase...
The scientific legacy of the USGS is the data and the scientific knowledge derived from it gathered over 130 years of research. However, it is widely assumed, and in some cases known, that high quality data, particularly legacy data critical for large time-scale analyses such as climate change and habitat change, is hidden away in case files, file cabinets, and hard drives housed in USGS science centers and field stations (both hereafter “science centers”). Many USGS science centers, such as the Fort Collins Science Center, have long, established research histories, are known repositories of data sets, and conduct periodic “file room cleanout” days that establish and enforce some minimal data lifecycle management...
The USMIN Project is multi-year project of the USGS Mineral Resource Program (MRP) whose objective is to develop a comprehensive geospatial database of the mines, mineral deposits and mineral districts of the United States. This database builds upon MRP projects which date back to the late 1960’s and will provide data that will be of value to other parts of the USGS, other federal and state agencies and the general public. Mine Features, which are defined as “a single human-made object or disturbance associated with mining, such as a shaft or adit (vertical or horizontal opening), tailings, machinery and facilities, etc. A mine can be comprised of one or more features.” are a major component of the database....
This project sought to incorporate land-use land-cover time series data into the Geo Data Portal web service infrastructure. Till now, the Geo Data Portal has been used for relatively low spatial resolution downscaled climate data. Data from the EPA’s Integrated Climate and Land Use Scenarios was incorporated into a web service compatible with the Geo Data Portal and is now hosted in the Geo Data Portal catalog. Great progress was made in establishing connections between the Land-Processes Distributed Active Archive Center’s (LP-DAAC) holdings of MODIS satellite derived land cover data. At this time, the data is only available on development servers, but many issues were fixed and close partners are using the integration...
thumbnail
Global climate models are a key source of climate information and produce large amounts of spatially explicit data for various physical parameters. However, these projections have substantial uncertainties associated with them, and the datasets themselves can be difficult to work with. The project team created the first version (cst 0.1.0) of the Climate Futures Toolbox, an open source workflow in R that allows users to access downscaled climate projections data, clip data by spatial boundaries (shapefile), save the output, and generate summary tables and plots. A detailed R vignette guides users to easily generate derived variables in order to answer specific questions about their region of interest (e.g. how will...
Geographic Information System (GIS) analyses are an essential part of natural resource management and research. Calculating and summarizing data within intersecting GIS layers is common practice for analysts and researchers. However, the various tools and steps required to complete this process are slow and tedious, requiring many tools iterating over hundreds, or even thousands of datasets. We propose to combine a series of ArcGIS geoprocessing capabilities with custom scripts to create tools that will calculate, summarize, and organize large amounts of data that can span many temporal and spatial scales with minimal user input. The tools work with polygons, lines, points, and rasters to calculate relevant summary...
As research and management of natural resources shift from local to regional and national scales, the need for information about aquatic systems to be summarized to multiple scales is becoming more apparent. Recently, four federally funded national stream assessment efforts (USGS Aquatic GAP, USGS National Water-Quality Assessment Program, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] StreamCat, and National Fish Habitat Partnership) identified and summarized landscape information into two hydrologically and ecologically significant scales of local and network catchments for the National Hydrography Dataset Plus (NHDPlus). These efforts have revealed a significant percentage of assessment funds being directed to the...
To make informed decisions, land managers require knowledge about the state of the ecosystems present. Vegetation structure is a key indicator of the state of forested systems; it influences habitat suitability, water quality and runoff, microclimate, and informs wildfire-related characteristics such as fuel loads, burn severity, and post-fire regeneration. Field data used to derive vegetation structure are limited in spatial and temporal extent. Alternatively, forest growth simulation models estimate vegetation structure, but do not capture all factors influencing vegetation growth. Assessment of vegetation structure can be improved by using observations to derive maps which can be used to calibrate modeled forest...
thumbnail
USGS research for the Risk and Vulnerability to Natural Hazards project at the Western Geographic Science Center has produced several geospatial datasets estimating the time required to evacuate on foot from two tsunami evacuation zones (standard and extreme) traveling at three travel speeds (impaired, slow, and fast walking speeds) for the Island of O’ahu, HI. Tabulation of O’ahu resident and employee counts by region, community, and the estimated travel speed necessary to reach safety within 15 minutes serves as the final dataset for conclusions. These data are useful for emergency managers and community planners to plan for tsunami evacuations, but are often difficult to serve using traditional static maps and...
Fire has increased dramatically across the western U.S. and these increases are expected to continue. With this reality, it is critical that we improve our ability to forecast the timing, extent, and intensity of fire to provide resource managers and policy makers the information needed for effective decisions. For example, an advanced, spatially-explicit prediction of the upcoming fire season would support the planning and prioritization of fire-fighting crews, the placement and abundance of fire breaks, and the amount and type of seed needed for post-fire restoration. While the Southwest has seen exceptional increases in fire, these drier ecosystems are also notably difficult for fire predictions because of unique...
Mapping the occurrence of post-fire flooding and debris flow is crucial for 1) integrating observations into models used to define rainfall thresholds for early warning, 2) understanding patterns of inundation, and 3) improving models for predictive hazard assessment. Despite the critical role mapping plays in post-fire hazard assessment and early warning, there has not been a standardized approach for mapping floods and debris flows with consistent protocols. This project will develop and test a mapping schema using ArcGIS Collector, a mobile mapping platform. We will test the approach in five areas that burned in 2020 through a collaboration between the USGS and the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral...
thumbnail
Many coastal areas are experiencing departures from normal conditions due to changing land use and climate patterns, including increased frequency, severity, or duration of floods and droughts, in some cases combinations of the two. To address these issues, the U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Salinity Index (CSI) to identify and communicate fluctuating salinity conditions due to such disturbance events through quantitative analyses of long-term salinity records. This project aims to make the CSI broadly useful as a monitoring, forecasting, and decision-making tool, extending the platform to enable real-time reporting of disturbance events as they unfold and covering a larger user base than what existing...
Drought is a major problem in the American Southwest that is expected to worsen under the effects of climate change. Currently, the Southwest Biological Science Center is monitoring the effects of drought with soil moisture probes in a range of ecosystems across an elevational gradient on the Colorado Plateau. These data are used in multiple studies to analyze the effects of drought on vegetation composition and demography. Accessing and analyzing that data still relies on traditional site visits, which can result in delayed recognition of erroneous data, a common pitfall in many field-science operations. We propose to improve upon this traditional data workflow by leveraging the use of Internet of Things (IoT)...
thumbnail
Rangeland ecosystems are one of the largest single providers of agro-ecological services in the U.S. The plant growth of these rangelands helps determine the amount of forage available for our livestock and for wildlife, as well as information about fire likelihood and restoration opportunities. However, every spring, ranchers and other rangeland managers face the same difficult challenge —trying to approximate how much and where grass will be available during the upcoming growing season. This project represents an innovative grassland productivity forecasting tool, named “Grass-Cast”, which we are developing for the US Southwest to help managers and producers in the region reduce this economically important source...
map background search result map search result map USGS Data at Risk: Expanding Legacy Data Inventory and Preservation Strategies Open-Source and Open-Workflow Climate Futures Toolbox for Adaptation Planning Open-Source and Open-Workflow Climate Futures Toolbox for Adaptation Planning