Highlights for August 18, 2000
USGS Center for Biological Informatics

I. Key Department News:

• GAP Annual Meeting. The USGS Gap Analysis Program (GAP) concluded its 10th Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on August 16. The meeting was hosted by the Texas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Texas Tech University, which is the Texas GAP project coordinator. More than 140 attendees discussed technical, scientific, and policy issues relating to GAP. Attendees included representatives from The Nature Conservancy, Defenders of Wildlife, the World Wildlife Fund, and federal, state, foreign, and university organizations. The mission of GAP is to provide regional assessments of the conservation status of native vertebrate species and natural land cover types and to facilitate the application of this information to land management activities. (Tom Owens, Denver, 303-202-4259)
• USGS—Hawaii Consortium Collaboration. As a segue from the USGS Gap Analysis Program (GAP) national conference in San Antonio, Dr. Sam Gon III, Director of Science for The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, stopped in Denver on August 16 to discuss decision support systems (DSS) with USGS Center for Biological Informatics (CBI) staff members Mike Mulligan and Susan Fayad, and consultant Brenda Faber. CBI has been exploring the use of DSS with a Hawaiian consortium of natural resources organizations including federal, state, and non-governmental entities. CBI plans to demonstrate applications of GAP and other biological characterization program data, along with the extensive data of the consortium, as a first phase of implementing CBI's conceptual model for DSS. In conjunction with this initiative, the Orton Family Foundation has expressed interest in working with CBI to apply its Community Viz DSS software to environmental decision-making. The August 16 meeting provided an opportunity for a representative from the Hawaiian consortium to see the capabilities of Community Viz and a demonstration of the application of Hawiian data, as well as to explore possible natural resources problems that could take advantage of DSS functionality. The next step will be to move the problem definition and application forward. CBI manages biological characterization programs whose information and data provide the structure for framing and answering critical scientific questions about vegetation communities and their relationships to environmental processes across the landscape. (Susan Fayad, Denver, 303-202-4224)
• Additional cc:Mail Post Office Shutdown. With the assistance of John Clark of the USGS Center for Biological Informatics, the Western Ecological Research Center has completed migration of their cc:Mail users to Lotus Notes, and their email post office has been decommissioned. (John Clark, Denver, 303-202-4244)
• CBI Supports New USGS Grand Canyon Facility. Staff from the USGS Center for Biological Informatics will assist the USGS Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center with startup information management expertise for technical projects. (John Clark, Denver, 303-202-4244)

II. Agency Works on Presidential Initiatives: No report.

III. Notable Congressional Activity: No report.

IV. Press/Media Inquiries: No report.

V. FOIA Requests: No report.