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Our Points

Sunday, August 3. 2008

Kempthorne Announces that 35 Years of Landsat Data Free to Public

USGS Remote Sensing

Speaking at the ESRI UC Senior Executive Summit in San Diego, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, announced that the 35 years of archived Landsat data will be made available over the web free to the public by the end of the year. The EROS Data Center (EDC) of the USGS will be the lead center to implement this initiative. Though not mentioned specifically, it's likely that some of the data may be released through EDC's EarthExplorer portal that was a pilot project begun last year for Landsat 7 data.


Listen to my interview with Secretary Kempthorne and USGS Director Mark Myers regarding the announcement of the Landsat data and a follow up questions I asked regarding the USGS's roll in providing policy-makers information about the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and offshore drilling.

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Posted by Joe Francica in USGS, Remote Sensing, ESRI UC 08 at 13:35 | Comments (0)

Tuesday, July 8. 2008

Former USGS director Charles Groat, former Officials Call for Earth Systems Science Agency

USGS
If you don't follow press releases or read Science you may have missed this:
In an article published today in the journal Science, a group of former senior federal officials call for the establishment of an independent Earth Systems Science Agency (ESSA) to meet the unprecedented environmental and economic challenges facing the nation. They propose forming the new agency by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)....

The authors recommend that no less than 25 percent of the new agency's budget be devoted to grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements with academic and nonprofit institutions.

The full text is behind a wall. The press release goes on to quote David Rejeski, of the Woodrow Wilson Center (and one of my favorite interviewees back in the day), suggesting that high risk, high reward efforts, such as DARPA (the folks behind the Internet among other things) are just the ticket for a better future.
Posted by Adena Schutzberg in USGS at 06:48 | Comments (0)

Wednesday, June 4. 2008

USGS is on Twitter

USGS
It's an odd set of tweets: it consists entirely of posts like this:

"What is coastal prairie?: Read for the answer to this question. http://tinyurl.com/69v9tg"

The link goes to a USGS FAQ page. For the full list see the full feed.

Interesting marketing effort or annoying use of Twitter?
Posted by Adena Schutzberg in USGS at 08:16 | Comments (5)

Friday, May 9. 2008

Global Wildlife Disease News Map Version 2

USGS
USGS and partners launched Global Wildlife Disease News Map Version 2 back in March; version 1 was out last December. To be clear this is a news map (Google Map mashup), not a map of disease, but a map of news on disease. So, when you "turn on" avian flu, you get a hit in Ohio. Strange, I thought, didn't hear about that. Of course not! The article in the local paper was about how cows tested negative.

Even though I read the title with "news" in it several times, I kept thinking this was a map of spread. The other disappointment is that all news is tagged with point markers color coded to geographic level. Different colored "tears" mean: Place, County, Administrative Unit, Country, Continent. While I know creating meaningful polygons is a challenge, I found this confusing. I'd prefer they not symbolize for geographic level and let users explore that when they mouse over, more like MetaCarta's GeoSearch News.

Details of how the app works are here. In the works: search by date range, user generated filters (queries I guess), more historic data, extraction of text.


Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, USGS at 07:21 | Comments (0)

Monday, April 21. 2008

Presidential Advisor: Climate Change Could Mean More Work for EROS

USGS Remote Sensing
John Marburger, the president's science advisor, visited EROS in South Dakota (Joe Francica worked there back in the day) and sees a bright future for the nation's image repository. A new Landsat satellite planned for 2011 and the potential of a command and control center in Sioux Falls means the center may take over some work currently done in Maryland.

- KELO
Posted by Adena Schutzberg in USGS, Remote Sensing, GIS Jobs at 06:23 | Comments (0)

Monday, February 25. 2008

NGAC Looking To Many Sources for Input...Including the Consumer

USGS LBS

I had a chance to hear Ann Hale Miglarese, the newly minted chairperson of the National Geospatial Advisory Comittee (NGAC). She provided the nominal mission of NGAC as follows: The committee will provide advice and provide recommendations on federal geospatial policy and management issues and provide a forum to convey views representative of partners in the geospatial community. This committee will help provide advice and perspectives from a broad range of our partner orgs as we continue to develop new ways to utilize geospatial information for the benefit of the public.

But Ms. Miglarese had a very interesting observation: "In the future, we need to find a way to partner with companies that are spending $400 or $500 million dollars a year," referring to Microsoft, Google, and NAVTEQ. "What we have done for years and years are now coming down to the consumer. That casual consumer will drive many of our policies. The National Geospatial Advisory Committee is a place where that dialog can occur and about what we should be debating and how to grow the NSDI."


Posted by Joe Francica in Google, USGS, Microsoft, LBS, ESRI Fed UC 08 at 01:53 | Comments (0)
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Comments

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