Highlights for September 24, 1999
USGS Center for Biological Informatics

I. Key Department News:

• USGS Proposes DSS for County Planning in NW Arkansas. USGS staff met with city and county planners from Washington and Benton Counties in northwest Arkansas on September 23 and recommended that they adopt the decision support system (DSS) "Smart Places." Conceived initially for the redevelopment of the former Stapleton Airport in Denver (see http://www.smartplaces.com/Origin.htm), an enhanced version of the DSS called AR/GIS was proposed to be incorporated into the region's Community Asset and Development Information System (CADIS), which was initially developed at the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies. The addition of "Smart Places" has the potential for further enhancing planning efforts through modeling, scenario building, and computer-assisted group decision making. USGS scientists from the Center for Biological Informatics, Rocky Mountain Mapping Center,and Water Resources are teaming up to provide interdisciplinary support and information for adoption and use of this DSS tool in northwest Arkansas. This-two year effort will involve developing pilot scenarios and models in a selected portion of the two-county area for the first year, with plans to expand to the entire two-county region the second year. (Ralph Root, Denver, 303-202-4232)

• USGS Facilitates Waterton National Park Aerial Photography. The USGS-NPS Vegetation Mapping Program assisted Waterton National Park, Canada, in collecting new aerial photography. Waterton National Park is cooperating with the Glacier National Park vegetation classification and mapping project in order to create a uniform database for both Parks. The USGS had arranged, with the cooperation of the National Park Service Fire Program, for a new set of aerial photography to be flown for Glacier to use for mapping vegetation communities, and coordinated this effort with the Waterton photography. Waterton National Park required a new set of photography to meet Program mapping standards. This photography will not only benefit Waterton National Park in creating a high-quality vegetation dataset, it will aid Glacier Naitonal Park in extending the project area, allowing more holistic analyses using the data. (Tom Owens, Denver, 303-202-4259).

• USGS Coordinates Data Standards with NPS. Staff from the USGS-NPS Vegetation Mapping Program met with staff from the National Park Service (NPS) Inventory and Monitoring (I&M) Program on September 21 to discuss data standards for the program. The program has not developed data structure and organization standards, but has matured to the point where it will create these standards for each completed park. USGS staff reviewed NPS I&M data standards for other data layers in the I&M program, such as geology and soils, and has agreed to comply with these standards to the extent practicable. This data standardization will ease the integration of the vegetation datasets with other I&M layers, improve their functionality across parks, and make database development more efficient. (Tom Owens, Denver, 303-202-4259)

II. Agency Works on Presidential Initiatives:

• NBII Presented to Forest Service. A visit by National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) staff to the USDA Forest Service Office in Atlanta is scheduled for September 22. The major topics for discussion are current NBII technology efforts, NBII-2 regional nodes, the NBII Integrated Taxonomic Information System and its potential for use by the Forest Service, and other common efforts. The meeting is being designed to enable both groups to gain a better understanding of their respective biological efforts and to identify specific projects for future collaboration. (Mike Frame, Denver, 303 202-4260)

III. Notable Congressional Activity: No report.

IV. Press/Media Inquiries: No report.

V. FOIA Requests: No report.