CaLSIP Project Team

Team

Project Lead

Mr. Gary Darling
Chief Information Officer
California Resources Agency
California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES)

Gary Darling oversees computer and telecommunications technology for the Resources Agency's 23 Departments, Boards, and Commissions, including the California Departments of Conservation, Fish and Game, Forestry and Fire Protection, Parks and Recreation and Water Resources and the California Coastal, Energy and State Lands Commissions.

He is also director of CERES, the Resources Agency's core environmental data access system. Mr. Darling has been active in both computer networking and large scale data systems for the last decade. He was Domain Name Authority for California State government agencies connections to the Internet though most of the 1980's. He also served on the operations committee responsible for the management of the Sequoia 2000 project where he gained experience in high speed networking and ultra large data storage systems. He represents the Resouces Agency on the U.C. Berkeley Digital Library Project.

B. S., Political Economy of Natural Resources, U.C. Berkeley
B. A., Economics, U.C. Berkeley

Project Member

Dr. Sheila Hurst
Outreach Projects Coordinator
California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES)

Dr. Hurst has been the Outreach Projects Coordinator for the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES) since 1994. She is also director of the CERES Land Use Planning Information Network (LUPIN and the CERES Environmental Education Program. She chairs the multi-agency California Home Page Workgroup on Universal Access, is the California Resources Agency's Environmental Education coordinator, and serves on the Rural Telecommunications Committee of the Governor's Office, the California Environmental Education Interagency Network, the Resources Agency Committee on Intellectual Property, and the California Biodiversity Council Committee for Education and Outreach, and is the Resources Agency liaison to the Data Providers Committee of the UC Berkeley Digital Library Group. Prior to joining CERES, Dr. Hurst was employed as an educator and a trust administrator.

Ed.D., Organization and Leadership, University of San Francisco
M.A., Educational Psychology, CSU, Northridge
B.A. cum laude, Education, Occidental College
Paralegal Certificate, CSU, Chico

Project Member

Dr. Robert H. Twiss
Professor of Environmental Planning
University of California, Berkeley

Robert H. Twiss is a Professor in the Graduate School, The University of California, Berkeley, and consultant in the field of Environmental Planning. Current work focuses on creating frameworks for planning and decision support using Geographic Information Systems and advanced telecommunications. He is also a participant in the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project. He initiated and serves as Principal Investigator for the Research Program in Environmental Planning and Geographic Information Systems

(REGIS ), which develops databases and tools for open access to geographic information on land use, natural resources, and the environment. He has worked at all levels of planning, with research and consultancies for local, regional, state, and federal agencies, assignments abroad for foreign governments and institutions (in China, Mexico, Australia, & Ecuador) and the United Nations (Yugoslavia).

Ph.D., Conservation, School of Natural Resources, The University of Michigan, 1962 M.S., School of Natural Resources, The University of Michigan, 1960.
B.S., San Jose State University, 1955

Project Member

Kenn Gardels is a GIS Research Specialist and Director of REGIS (Research Program in Environmental Planning and Geographic Information Systems) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he coordinates project and research efforts, including all phases of projects involving GIS. Activities include development of research strategies and initiatives for REGIS, liaison with researchers in other campus units, research project management, direction of a software system analysis and design team, modeling, and workshop/short course development and implementation.

Public service activities include advising Bay Area planning, policy, and environmental conservation organizations, participating in regional and state-wide digital data library coordination, review of agency GIS research and implementation plans, and volunteer work with GIS professional organizations.

He has been closely involved with the Open GIS Specification (OGIS) Project since its inception, and current projects include harmonization of OGIS with both the Berkeley Digital Library Project and CERES (California Environmental Resources Evaluation System). Previously he participated in the Sequoia 2000 project to build a massive information server supporting global change research.

He serves on the Board of Directors of the Open GIS Consortium and additionally is on the editorial review boards for various journals and publishers.

Recent publications include:

Open GIS and On-Line Environmental Libraries, SIGMOD Record, 26:1, March, 1997.
Environmental Modeling Using Open GIS, Proceedings, Workshop/Symposium on Environmental Modeling and GIS, Santa Fe, NM, NCGIA, Feb, 1996.
A Comprehensive Data Model for Distributed, Heterogeneous Geographic Information, USA-CERL, June 1996.
CERES and ELIB: A Distributed Digital Library of Environmental Information, Geo Info Systems, May 1995.

Project Member

Mr. Edwin Sheffner
Senior Research Scientist, Johnson Controls World Services
NASA Ames Research Center

Mr. Sheffner is a geographer with 20 years experience in RS. He is currently working with the Mission to Planet Earth Program Office at Goddard Space Flight Center on policy issues related to Landsat 7 and on the BADGER Program at Ames Research Center. For the latter, he is responsible for managing participation of staff the Ecosystem Science and Technology Branch in BADGER on tasks involving the integration of BADGER technology with the Internet and BADGER applications.

Mr. Sheffner has been associated with the Ames Research Center since 1982. He also has worked professionally with the Earth Sciences Program of the University Space Research Association in Washington D.C. for the past 18 months and the RS Research Program of the University of California, Berkeley for five years. He taught courses in geography, including physical geography, geography of California and RS and air photo interpretation, at American River College, Santa Rosa Junior College, and California State University Stanislaus.

M.A. Geography, University of California, Davis, 1975
B.A. History, University of California, Berkeley, 1969

Project Member

Mr. Don Sullivan
Senior Engineer and Internet Software Architect
Johnson Controls World Services
Ames Research Center
California State University Monterey Bay

Mr. Sullivan is currently senior engineer and Internet software architect in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA's Ames Research Center. His current work includes system and network programming for the DASI/ERAST project, management and design for one of the nodes on the 6bone, the virtual network doing experimental design on the next-generation Internet protocol suite, and webmaster for the BADGER project. As part of the last, he developed a data browsing and ordering adaptive user interface CGI binary suite and a number of distributed applications including the database transaction protocol for the BADGER project and TCP/IP network analysis tools.

Mr. Sullivan has also written image processing and GIS packages that used various remotely sensed datasets including one that analyzed synthetic aperture radar data for fisheries' analysis and another that generated crop statistics for the USDA. He is currently part time faculty at California State University Monterey Bay teaching object-oriented programming and design and UNIX and the X Window systems.

B.S., Electrical Engineering and Mathematics

Project Member

Dr. Joseph Coughlan
Research Scientist
Ecosystem Science and Technology Branch, NASA/Ames Research Center

Joseph Coughlan is a civil servant scientist in the Ecosystem Science and Technology Branch of the NASA Ames Research Center and is an adjunct professor at the California State University at Monterey Bay in Center for Science, Technology, & Information Resources. Dr. Coughlan is an ecosystem modeler working in the domain of landscape ecology. He is presently funded to study carbon and water cycling in Oregon forests while documenting the estimation errors and uncertainty associated with methods involving remote sensing data. He is also funded to study the application of RADAR and optical remote sensing methods to improve vegetation monitoring. Dr. Coughlan holds a Ph.D. in Forestry from the University of Montana (1991) and came to NASA as a NRC Fellow studying super-computer applications in Earth science. He has a MS in Computer Science (CS) from the University of Idaho (1985) where he specialized in artificial intelligence and graphics programming, while he conducted research and publish peer review papers in aquatic ecology. He authored his first forest simulation model as an undergraduate at Rockford College, earning a BA in Biology (1982) with an emphasis in both Spanish and CS.

Project Member

Dr. Christopher Potter
Research Scientist
Ecosystem Science and Technology Branch
NASA Ames

Dr. Potter's research at Ames on computer simulations of greenhouse gas fluxes from the terrestrial biosphere using satellite data drivers (otherwise known as the NASA-Ames "Breathing Earth" model) has been prominently featured in NASA's promotional documents for the Earth Observing System Interdisciplinary Science Program. He currently sits on the Public Affairs Committee of the Ecological Society of America and has contributed invited reviews of several recent reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has also served on the National Research Council Steering Committee on Global Change Data Information Systems. In addition, he has extensive international experience in science and technology policy, having served for two years as a Diplomacy Fellow (sponsored by AAAS) with the U. S. Agency for International Development in Washington, D.C. He came to Ames in 1990 as a National Research Council (NRC) Associate. He is the author on over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. In 1996, he was awarded NASA's Public Service Medal for development of the first computer model for global ecosystem exchange of all major biogenic trace gases with the atmosphere.

Ph.D., Forest Ecology, Emory University
M.S., Forest Ecology, Emory University

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