Highlights for January 24, 2002

I. Key Department/Bureau News

• Workshop to Explore Southwest Landscape Change: The Land Use History of North America Program (LUHNA), in cooperation with staff from the National Mapping Division's Rocky Mountain Mapping Center, will host the "Southwest Landscape Change Workshop" on February 20-21, 2002 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The workshop is intended to foster interdisciplinary research and collaboration among USGS programs and other agencies studying landscape change in the arid southwest U.S. Support is provided through funding from the USGS Geologic Division's Multi-program Workshops on the Arid Southwest and in-kind assistance from the USGS-BRD New Mexico Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. The LUHNA Program is managed by the USGS Center for Biological Informatics. biology.usgs.gov/luhna/(Julie Prior-Magee, Las Cruces, 505/646-1084)

II. Agency Work on Presidential Initiatives

• NBII to InCOB2002: Senior representatives of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) program will soon join bioinformatics experts from around the world at InCOB2002, the International Conference on Bioinformatics 2002: North-South Networking. The conference will be held from February 6-8 at the Royal Meridien Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand. NBII senior staff will explore new partnership opportunities as they raise program visibility to an international audience by delivering a formal paper on “Bioinformatics and Biodiversity” and a poster session on “BioBot, the Biological Search Engine for the Web.” Both presentations will focus on the NBII’s successes nationally as well as its growing role within a developing hemispheric and global biodiversity network. The NBII is a broad, collaborative program – coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey – that provides increased access to data and information on the nation’s biodiversity. (Ron Sepic, Reston, 703/648-4218)

• USGS/CBI to Conduct Metadata Workshop: On February 25-26, 2002, Sharon Shin, USGS, Center for Biological Informatics, will conduct a two-day training workshop, in Albuquerque, NM, on the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s Biological Data Profile (metadata) in partnership with the National Park Service- Intermountain Support Office- Albuquerque. Executive Order 12906 requires all federal agencies and those entities using federal funds for geospatial data development create metadata as a means to share data via the Internet. (Sharon Shin, Denver, 303/202-4320)

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.