Highlights for August 23, 2001

I. Key Department/Bureau News

• The Land Use History of North America Program Awarded Funding to Conduct a Southwest Landscape Change Workshop: The USGS Geological Division’s Multi-program Workshops on the Arid Southwest has awarded the LUHNA Program funding to conduct a workshop. The purpose of the program is to focus multidisciplinary research and increase communication and collaboration having to do with the arid land surface of the Southwestern United States by sponsoring several workshops. The LUHNA workshop will be held in February 2002 in New Mexico and is intended to build a multi-disciplinary framework for a southwest landscape change project. The focus of this project could encompass all or parts of: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. This workshop will bring together scientists from all disciplines of USGS as well as other natural resource agencies. The primary outcome will be decisions related to the need for and focus on a southwest landscape change project. Specific areas of discussion will include: potential research focus; identifying modeling tools and techniques for the project; project organizational structure and staff/facility needs; and identifying areas of collaboration with other programs conducting landscape change research. The LUHNA Program is managed by the USGS Center for Biological Informatics. (Julie Prior-Magee, Las Cruces, NM, 505-646-1084) biology.usgs.gov/luhna/

• Global Positioning System coordinators to meet September 11, 2001 in conjunction with the US Coast Guard, the GPS Interagency Advisory Council, and the ION-GPS conference in Salt Lake City. The Department of the Interior’s Bureau GPS coordinators will discuss the annual needs and authority to use the Precise Positioning Service, or military signal, of the GPS position, velocity, and timing signals. They will also review alternative systems that meet the 1-5 meter positioning needs of the Interior Bureaus. The US Coast Guard and Department of Transportation meetings from Sunday to Tuesday include Department of Defense briefings on system development, and updates on the modernization efforts to bring real-time differential corrections to the remainder of the Continental US. The Institute of Navigation (ION) conference from Tuesday-Friday showcases new developments in both positioning and data fusion tools of interest to the DOI science users. Karl Brown, of the USGS Center for Biological Informatics, will host the coordinators meeting on Tuesday from 1-4 P.M. as the Departmental coordinator. The use of GPS extends across all agencies and disciplines, and the expanded accuracies of less than 20 meters are of use to a wide variety of scientific and natural resource management users. (Karl Brown, Denver, 303-202-4240)

II. Agency Work on Presidential Initiatives

• "NBII: Data and Information Access Through Partnership." Gulf of Mexico Integrated Database Workshop September 18-20, 2001, Tampa, Florida. Sharon Shin of the Center for Biological Informatics will present National Biological Information Infrastructure’s data and information access successes at the Gulf of Mexico Integrated Data Base Workshop. The workshop is hosted by the National Mapping Program, the Biological Resource discipline, the Coastal and Marine Geology Program, and the five Gulf state Water Resource Division District Chiefs. It will address the development of Internet-based systems to distribute information to Gulf-wide science activities. (Sharon Shin, Denver, 303-202-4230)

III. Notable Congressional Activity
Nothing to report this week.

IV. Press/Media Inquiries
Nothing to report this week.

V. Key FOIA Requests
Nothing to report this week.