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set (a "transaction" profile). The USGS is actively working with States and local communities to identify requirements for SDTS profiles to support municipal and utility requirements. Information for profile development needs is being requested from State and local governments and the private sector through professional societies.

User guides and other training materials for the SDTS are currently being developed to increase knowledge and understanding of the SDTS within the user community. The USGS will use these materials in workshops and other presentations to promote the use of the SDTS.

Although the vendor community will play a large role in software development, the USGS is producing publicly available software tools to support encoding and decoding of SDTS data. The first of these tools-as ISO 8211/FIPS 123 Function Library is already available. In addition, the USGS is designing a processing system to support SDTS transfers of its own digital spatial data, such as DLG's and digital elevation models. DLG data will be made available in the SDTS TVP by January 1994.

The SDTS contains a standard model for a spatial features data dictionary as well as a list of terms and definitions for entities and attributes. The features and attributes glossary, which provides a foundation for standardizing

spatial features, currently contains a limited set of hydrographic and topographic terms. Because of increased efforts to share and integrate spatial data, the glossary must be expanded to include terms and definitions for additional categories of data. The NIST has established a FIPS Spatial Features Register at the USGS to allow the periodic addition, modification, or deletion of spatial features. A plan to maintain the register and to identify sponsoring groups for appropriate categories of spatial features is being developed with input from the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC).

Longer term goals for SDTS activities include maintenance of FIPS 173 to ensure that it continues to meet data exchange requirements for spatial data and continued cooperation with the spatial data community to address national and international implementation needs.

The USGS is working closely with the FGDC and relevant professional societies to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to be actively involved in the development and promotion of the SDTS. To encourage widespread use of the SDTS, the USGS is developing additional agreements to increase participation and support.

Kathryn C. Wortman manages the SDTS maintenance authority and a program of developmental data standards and technology assessment for the USGS

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National Map and Digital Data Cooperative Program

The advent of geographic information

Tastem (GIS) technology has created

an enormous demand for accurate digital spatial data. To better meet the growing demand for data, the USGS established the National Map and Digital Data Cooperative program. The production of spatial data with partners from State and local government agencies, public utilities, and the private sector will enable the USGS to fulfill more product needs, accelerate the growth of the national data base, and reduce costs and duplication.

To facilitate the development of production partnerships, the USGS is first identifying geographic areas where more than one type of geographic data is required. These high-demand areas then are targeted for the development of partnerships among several agencies. Typically, traditional funded or unfunded agreements are used. Funded agreements involve a transfer of funds; unfunded agreements usually involve the transfer of materials or the exchange of services.

In the past, these agreements were typically developed with Federal, State, and local government agencies only. However, in FY 1993, the USGS obtained the legislative authority to participate in production partnerships with the nongovernmental community. Under this innovative partnership program, the USGS seeks nonproprietary data produced by public utilities, State and local governments, and the private sector that are derived from USGS source materials. Proposals submitted by these organizations may request the purchase of existing data for a fair and reasonable price. or the funding of future data production. In the latter case, the USGS would provide funds to cover the incremental cost of producing the data to its standards. In either case, USGS contributions may not exceed 50 percent of production costs.

Program announcements for the innovative partnership program will appear periodically in the Commerce Business Daily to specify product types sought-currently digital line graph (DLG) data, digital elevation model (DEM) data, and digital orthophoto quadrangle (DOQ) data-and deadlines for

proposal submission. Although these program announcements currently have a specific proposal submission period, eventually there will be an open program announcement to which proposals may be submitted at any time.

Some traditional agreements developed in 1993 include a joint funding agreement with the State of Minnesota for the production of DOQ's for a major portion of the State and a cost-share agreement with the National Park Service for the production of DLG's and DEM's. Under innovative partnerships, the USGS will provide support to Ohio State University for the production of DLG's; to Graphics Information Technologies, Inc., for the purchase of existing Public Land Survey System data from several States; and to the State of Maine for the purchase of DLG's. Total non-National Mapping program contributions toward cooperative agreements in FY 1993 will exceed $3 million.

Gregory Snyder

is a staff cartographer involved in interagency coordination and base cartographic user needs

assessments

Mary Griffeth

is a staff cartographer providing cooperative program and policy support to USGS regional mapping center personnel

How Does Land Use Affect Water Quality in an Urban Watershed?

The

The Difficult Run watershed is approximately 59 square miles in size and drains an area of northern Virginia that, like many tributaries to the Potomac River in the Washington, D.C., area, has seen commercial and residential development in recent decades. Through agreements with the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District, the Soil Conservation Service, and other Federal and local government agencies, the Difficult Run environmental quality research project will establish a data base for continued environmental analysis by local government, citizen and environmental action and volunteer organizations, and local university and high school students.

For more information on the National Map and Digital Data Cooperative program, contact:

Telephone (703) 648-4710
Internet mgriffet@usgs.gov

GeoData are digital cartographic and geographic base data that have been collected, processed, and archived in the National Digital Cartographic Data Base for distribution to users in government agencies, the private sector, and the public. These data include elevation, planimetric, land-use and land-cover, orthophoto, and geographic names information in digital form, as well as comparable digital information contributed by other mapping organizations.

For more information on the Difficult
Run study, contact:

Telephone (703) 648-5543
Internet jjones@usgs.gov

For more information on base cartographic data, contact: Telephone (703) 648-4133 Internet gsnyder@usgs.gov

The project will examine the relationship between land-use change in the Difficult Run watershed and the quality of water in the basin. The base layers (hydrography, watershed and subwatershed boundaries, terrain elevation and slope) for the entire watershed have been derived from USGS GeoData products and will be used in water-quality sampling. Land-use information (past and current) will be gathered for the watershed. A geographic information system (GIS) will be used to portray Difficult Run's streamflow and water quality. Once the methods of sampling, land-cover mapping, and initial hydrologic modeling have been developed, university and advanced high school students will take over the project and will use GIS to continue the study. Any trends between landuse change and water quality indicated by the data will be documented in maps, videotapes, and reports.

John W. Jones

is a geographer in the USGS's GIS Research Laboratory who trains researchers in the use of GIS and conducts both basic and applied research using GIS, image processing, and related technologies

Are We Meeting Customer Needs for Base Cartography?

The

he transition from hard-copy map use to digital spatial data has prompted the need for a survey to determine whether USGS products contain the appropriate base cartographic information needed to satisfy the Nation's spatial data community. To be completed in 1994, the assessment is being conducted in three phases.

The preliminary phase will consist of interactive sessions, led by a facilitator, with representative digital line graph (DLG) user groups from the public and private sectors. These sessions will give users an opportunity to voice their concerns on DLG format and content. Several sessions were conducted in 1993 at open meetings of the Subcommittee on Base Cartographic Data and at regional State Mapping Advisory Committee meetings.

During the second phase, the information gathered in the interactive sessions will be analyzed independently by several reviewers. Preliminary analyses have shown that users are most concerned with cartographic feature content, geometric and feature classification, positional accuracy, currency, topology, and distribution media. Additionally, those data categories of greatest interest include hypsography (elevation of the Earth's surface with reference to sea level) and road networks.

In the final phase of the assessment, the analyses of data obtained from the interactive sessions will be used to develop a questionnaire. Questionnaire responses will be cross-tabulated to define user needs by organization and industry. The results of the assessment may be used to modify DLG content standards. Other factors to be considered before making changes to standards include availability of funding and technological constraints. This assessment will provide an initial baseline for digital data to support informed decisionmaking by a variety of users in the public and private

sectors.

Gregory Snyder

is a staff cartographer involved in interagency coordination and base cartographic data market research

Soil Mapping Developed at the EROS Data Center to Help Scientists

he EROS Data Center (EDC), the

Trederal archive for remotely sensed

data maintained by the USGS in Sioux Falls, S. Dak., has developed a new means of soil mapping on a continental scale that promises to help scientists understand the Earth's carbon cycle and its effects on phenomena such as global warming.

Using the State soil geographic (STATSGO) data base developed by the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), EDC and SCS scientists have used the STATSGO data in a geographic information system to produce maps of specific soil properties.

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The data base consists of digital

maps and associated data on soil properties. Map units that represent groupings of soils at a landscape level were compiled on USGS 1:250,000-scale base maps (1 inch4 miles). The map units are described as a set of soil phases. For each phase, a set of layer records represents a generalized profile of soil properties with depth. The map of soil carbon for the Eastern United States, for example, is based on estimates of the organic matter and bulk density for each layer. Average values per unit area (kilograms per square meter) are used to color the map (shown here in black and white). The total amount of soil organic carbon for the States shown is estimated to be 42.8 billion metric tons.

Using this data base and geographic information systems, scientists will be better able to assess how soils will respond to changes in climate.

Norman Bliss

has been developing soil data bases at the EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, S. Dak., since 1985

Sharon Waltman

is a soil scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service Jesse Nelson

is a graduate student at South Dakota State University

Monitoring Changes to Wetland Areas in the United States

The

he USGS is participating with the Wetlands Subcommittee of the Federal Geographic Data Committee to resolve inconsistencies among several wetlands classification reports produced by Federal agencies. The USGS assembled 10 data overlays for Wicomico County, Md., from various Federal and State agencies and placed them onto a geographic information system (GIS) for analysis and evaluation. A user interface was designed that allows the operator to analyze the data and make direct comparisons among data sets. More than 900 special plots (plus tabular reports) were produced on a GIS to identify and measure patterns of inconsistency in the data.

A progress report issued in the fall of 1993 describing the results of the Maryland case study showed that there are major disagreements between the data sets used in wetland identification. In the case of the Maryland data, the greatest inconsistencies were in the forested wetland area. Because the inconsistencies appear to be somewhat systematic, a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the various programs may allow users to use the data

For more information on soil mapping, contact:

Telephone (605) 594-6034
Internet nbliss@usgs.gov

For more information on wetlands monitoring, contact:

Telephone (703) 648-5512
Internet rberry@usgs.gov

For more information on the global land-cover characteristics data base, contact:

Telephone (605) 594-6066
Internet tlovelan@usgs.gov

more intelligently. Additional counties in various types of ecosystems will subsequently be studied nationwide.

Russell D. Berry

is a research cartographer using GIS technology to help solve wetland resource problems across the country

Information and Data Systems

The

he USGS, through its Earth Science Information Center (ESIC) network, provides a national clearinghouse service for cartographic, geographic, earthscience, and remotely sensed information and responds to national requirements to deliver this information to a community of Federal, State, and local government agencies and general public users. Functions performed include acquiring, archiving, managing, replicating, and distributing cartographic, geologic, hydrologic, and geographic information in many forms and responding to requests for earth-science information. In addition, a centralized facility in Denver, Colo., warehouses and distributes published USGS products, including 5.5 million maps in FY 1993.

In addition to providing product information and distribution services, the USGS manages cartographic, remotely sensed, and other earth-science data in digital and cartographic data bases. The USGS supports several major national data bases. The National Digital Cartographic Data Base organizes and manages the primary- and intermediate-scale digital map data files and digital orthophoto quadrangles. The geographic names information system is an automated data system that cites locations and descriptions for nearly 2 million proper names of places, features, and areas in the United States. The map separates tracking system is used to manage the inventory of original graphics from which the USGS's primary topographic base maps are printed. The Main Image File at the EROS Data Center is an electronic catalog of nearly 10 million aerial photographs and satellite images.

Building a Global LandCover Characteristics Data Base

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s part of the USGS Global Change Research program, the Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center (EDC) and the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies (CALMIT) have analyzed advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) and other data over time to characterize land cover to meet the needs of global change researchers.

The methods involved clustering a 1990 set of 28-day maximum composite images of the conterminous United States into 70 spectral-temporal classes and subsequently stratifying, refining, and labeling them with ancillary data. The result is a 159-class land-cover characteristics data base, available from the EDC on CD-ROM, that allows users to tailor data to the unique requirements of a variety of applications and to develop custom products. The map inserted at the back of this report is one product that was developed by using these data. It shows seasonal land-cover regions for the conterminous United States. These regions have unique combinations of vegetation mosaics, seasonal properties (onset, peak, and length of green period), and annual net primary production and are grouped into general land-cover types. Increasing color intensity within each group corresponds to increasing relative primary production.

Advanced very high resolution radiometer (AVHRR) is a sensor on board National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration polar orbiting meteorological satellites. The data from AVHRR sensors have a nominal resolution of 1.1 kilometer, represent five bands of reflected and emitted electromagnetic energy, and cover the entire Earth's surface each day. These data provide a unique means of monitoring and mapping the condition and dynamics of global vegetation.

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