The CaLSIP project is intended to link together a variety of data users and applications with a broad range of datastores, including NASA EOS data. Potential applications range from real-time response to long-term monitoring and planning. Key datasets required by decision-makers will be identified and catalogued within the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES), and the associated geodata will be made network accessible using an OGDI (Open Geospatial Datastore Interface) framework. In cooperation with NASA-Ames, CERES and its technical partners will establish a proxy service to enable direct access to data holdings at DAACs and as appropriate with other ESIP providers. Mechanisms will be established to automatically update links from users' applications to datasets as those data are updated, on a time frame consistent with the information content. The project will be leveraged off programs already underway to provide network connectivity and to employ CERES communication methods and networking with county, regional, and local governments and the public.

Architecture

The architecture of CaLSIP provides users with access to a broad, potentially unlimited range of environmental and geographic types and sources. Moreover, it is the opposite of traditional geographic information systems which historically have been limited by software architectures not intended to support distributed data or enterprise-wide usage. The CaLSIP system utilizes data models and dictionaries that offer open, modular, extensible solutions, enabling the interoperability required for integration across applications and information systems. System integration is founded on concepts of autonomous subsystems, interacting individually according to prescribed methods. Although a simple metaphor is a layered architecture of separate components, a more accurate picture is the Web itself, populated with ad hoc links and special purpose tools for various uses.

CaLSIP will be implementing a new distributed system it will be developing named QUAIL (Query, Understanding, and Analysis of Information on the Landscape). The four key aspects of QUAIL are: 1) the CERES core framework library, 2) supplemental data servers, including DAAC/ESIPs, 3) software systems, including user interface, middleware, and driver components, and 4) hardware infrastructure. These components are used in the construction of user applications.

Core Framework Library - The framework library consists of the baseline and thematic data at the heart of the system. While geographically referenced information is the most important data component of the system, the flow of information is not the same as in a GIS repository. Data elements are provided in terms of specific queries, not arbitrary datasets. Since there is not a single kernel or engine managing all the data in the collection, issues of conformity of specific data structures are largely irrelevant to the end user. Geographic concepts are expressed in terms of the modeling language, not the terms of the GIS software environment.

The information types for QUAIL include conventional GIS data layers, imagery and sensor data, monitoring records and observations, and reports. It is critical to understand that the Core Library is not intended to be a single, massive repository for all QUAIL data, but rather to contain critical shared datasets, to cache certain large datafiles needed for prescribed periods of time, and to provide a window into other data collections.

Supplemental Data Servers- QUAIL is predicated on the pre-existence of much of the data at the state and local levels as well as in NASA archives. The former include:

• geodata developed by the individual counties for their own planning and operations
• California Teale Data Center GIS Library
• collections in the various constituent departments, boards, commissions, and conservancies of the California Resources Agency
• real-time information feeds from monitoring and measurement stations
• Federal basemap, census, and special project archives
• photographic and digital imagery providers
• commercial value-added data suppliers

Another high-value information type is high resolution aerial imagery. By the time this project is implemented, commercial operators will be providing 1-meter pixel data for the entire globe, with repeat acquisition intervals on the order of days or weeks. Presently the cost associated with these is unknown, as are data licensing and redistribution requirements. If these prove onerous, an alternative source is scanned aerial photography. In conjunction with airborne synthetic aperture radar data products, photographic imagery can provide extremely detailed and well-controlled information. This project will explore the values of such commercial data sources, as well as the technical issues associated with integrating them into a complete production environment with unrestricted user access.

EOS data that have been identified as having special value to QUAIL are:

Cloud Properties

Current: GOES Pathfinder, TOVS Pathfinder, ISSCP, TOGA/COARE, FIRE;

Available by 1999: TRMM-VIRS,MODIS, MISR, SAGEIII

Precipitation

Current: SSMR, SSMI Pathfinder, TOGA/COARE; Available by 1999: TRMM-(PR,TMI)

Tropospheric Chemistry

Current: SAGE I & II, UARS-MLS; Available by 1999: MOPITT, SAGEIII, LIS

Lightning

Current: DMSP-OLS, OTD; Available by 1999: LIS

Total Solar Irradiance

Current: ERB, UARS-ACRIM; Available by 1999: ACRIM

Land Cover/Use Change

Current: AVHRR Pathfinder, Landsat Pathfinder, SSMI Pathfinder; Available

by 1999: ETM+, MODIS, MISR

Vegetation Dynamics

Current: Landsat Pathfinder, AVHRR Pathfinder, FIFE; Available by 1999:

MODIS, MISR, ETM+,

Surface Temperature

Current: SSMI Pathfinder, Landsat AVHRR Pathfinder, GOES Pathfinder, FIFE;

Available by 1999: MODIS, ETM+

Fire Occurrence

Current: Landsat; Available by 1999: MODIS, ETM+, MISR

Snow Cover

Current: SSMR, SSMI Pathfinder; Available by 1999: MODIS, ETM+

Software Components- The software to be utilized in the system is intended to rely on readily available public domain and commercial products and will not require significant investment in programming or system integration. Specific tools will include an object-relational database management system, capable of storing conventional as well as spatial and multi-media data types, a browser than can search for and retrieve data from multiple sources, a viewer (user interface and display) that can represent diverse data types, and a geoprocessor that provides basic and complex geographic visualization and analysis functions.

The basic premise of the network system is in the connectivity between disparate software environments and heterogeneous datastores; in other words, interoperability. This will be implemented initially using newly defined protocols for geodata access and management, notably the Open Geographic Database Interface (OGDI) application programming interface definitions, and its network implementation using the gltpd protocol (which adds spatial data and interactivity to the well-accepted httpd protocol). Connections to individual datastores are via specially constructed drivers that interface to individual APIs and query languages. As the Open Geodata Specification matures and receives full implementation by data and system providers, distributed access and network management will be handled completely via OGIS interfaces. This will also enable the direct incorporation of any new data provider, system, tool, or application that is OGIS compliant without additional integration efforts.

Hardware Infrastructure- The primary hardware component is an overall system server which will function as the repository of the framework library collection and the catalog of information resources. This is a UNIX-based server, including dual 64-bit processors, 256 megabytes of main memory, 30 to 60 gigabytes of disk space managed as a RAID device, a DAT tape device, and a T1 connection to the Internet. Desirable peripherals include laser printer, E-size color plotter, scanner, digitizer, and communications devices. Additional data servers should be compatible with networking and interoperability standards but do not need all the storage space of the primary server. Space needs will be determined on a county by county basis but should not exceed 20 GB for any one system. User application and public information nodes can be any type of platform (workstation, personal computer, etc.) that supports Java-enabled web browser technology. Peripherals necessary at each user site will be determined on a case-by-case basis by the manager and co-managers.

The Information Science (IS) Center of Excellence for NASA is at the Ames Research Center. Relying on NASA's IS mass storage and computational experiences within the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) group, we have begun work on a prototyped system capable of hosting and servicing CERES projects including this proposal's system, QUAIL. The recommended strategy is to avoid high cost, high maintenance, and complex technologies. To scale the system, we will rely on emerging, mass market technologies to incrementally upgrade and periodically replace our computing infrastructure with low cost, reliable components. Experts at NAS assure us that the linear growth of our data product volume will be offset by the exponential growth in computing and storage capacity.

NASA has designed and put in production a reliable, low cost Pentium Pro system that is capable of 90MB/second disk to memory transfer rate. It uses three Adaptec SCSI cards and uses NetBSD (a Unix version) as its operating system. With a Pentium class system, off the shelf components will allow us to add RAM and RAID disks at low costs - avoiding the need for a high maintenance, tape robot. The higher cost and quality RAID MEGADRIVE disks are presently costing NAS $0.30 /MB. NAS estimates that by the time this project begins, $80,000 could provide disk storage for holding all data for the first 4 years of the project. Backups of the data are possible using ~$10,000 jukebox technology.

The system we propose will be affordable and easy to maintain and upgrade. Other states will adopt QUAIL if it avoids technology which is expensive to purchase and maintain. NASA is sharing information on system designs with the State of California and CERES. Emergent technologies can be quickly added to QUAIL because of the MOUs and historically productive relationships NASA has with technology firms to support NAS.

Interoperability Framework-

The crux of the proposed system is interoperability among spatially-enabled applications and distributed, heterogeneous geodata collections. This is the basis for the selection of OGDI (Open Geospatial Datastore Interface) to establish syntactic and semantic congruence among local, state, and federal geodata and EOS data. It is also the reason for the use of gltp (geospatial locator transmission protocol) for connectivity between data providers and consumers. OGDI is currently under review by the Open GIS Consortium as an implementation specification for the Open GIS Specification (OGIS).

New technologies such as these provide a broader range of interoperability across fundamentally different datastores than federated schema mechanisms such as V0 and are more complete with respect to spatial data than catalog or clearinghouse tools such as CIP or GILS/GEO.

As described by its original developers, OGDI is an application programming interface (API) that sits between a GIS software package (the application) and various geospatial data products (or drivers). The open style of OGDI is similar to that of Microsoft Open DataBase Connectivity (ODBC), a programming interface that allows applications to access data in a data base management system using Structured Query Language (SQL). Like ODBC, OGDI uses a driver approach, achieving interoperability by accessing each geospatial data format through an appropriate driver.

OGDI is based on the TCP/IP protocol and consequently can easily use the Internet as a medium to distribute geospatial data products. OGDI facilities can be accessed either through an ANSI C or a Tcl/Tk API, which can be called from Win32 or UNIX applications. OGDI is already available and all its source code has been made available to the public domain; there are no fees, and there is no private club associated with it.

OGDI provides tools for some of the most difficult geospatial data integration tasks, including:

• the conversion of various formats into a uniform transient data structure;
• the transparent adjustment of coordinate systems and cartographic projections;
• the transparent transformation of platform-dependent representations; and
• the retrieval of geometric and attribute data.

The transient data model supports both geometric and attribute data. Geometric data is divided into vector (area, line, point) and raster data (line or tile access). Metadata used includes geographic regions and coverage, cartographic projection and sources. More information on the transient data model can be found in LAS (1996a).

Figure 1 illustrates the components of the OGDI architecture. A dynamically loadable C language, API is normally used to access OGDI facilities. Alternatively, a Tcl/Tk API can also be called from an application. Drivers are used to access various geospatial data formats, one for each format. A driver is also a dynamically loadable library that processes C language API requests for a specific datastore. Once a driver is loaded, it receives requests, fetches information from the datastore, translates it into the uniform transient data structure and returns the results to the application. All the APIs are available for UNIX operating systems (Solaris and Linux) and for Microsoft's Windows NT and Windows 95 operating systems.

Drivers can be accessed directly, for local datastores, or remotely, for external datastores. For remote procedure calls, other components are needed. The gltpd (geographic locator transfer protocol daemon) module is a small utility program that mimics the behavior of the C language API on a remote computer. The network driver is a special dynamically-loadable library that relays calls from the C API to a gltpd process running on a remote computer. The gltpd process and the network driver are used together to link the application to a remote driver through a TCP/IP network, allowing the application programmer to access remote drivers as if they were local, using a client/server paradigm. When the gltpd process receives its first request from an application, it creates a new thread (a fork) of itself, which loads the requested driver type, takes control of the communication process with the network driver and serves all subsequent OGDI calls coming from the application.

Applications

The QUAIL architecture and interoperability framework are designed to facilitate the construction of diverse applications.

In order to demonstrate this capability and to provide meaningful solutions to resource decision-making, two projects have been identified which will use the foundation technologies: California Emergency Response and Land Use Planning.

California Emergency Response

Background

"Natural hazards are inevitable manifestations of Earth processes but need not be inevitable disasters. NASA can assist society in reducing losses of life, casualties and property and reducing social and economic disruptions from future natural disasters. Our vision is to contribute to the scientific understanding of Earth processes and conditions that lead to natural disasters, apply NASA-developed, Earth-science inspired technology to mitigation of risk, transfer demonstrated technology to responsible federal and state agencies, and develop international conventions for timely exchange of space-based information relating to disastrous events." [MTPE]

If the Mission to Planet Earth and EOS-DIS are to be successful, the information provided by the system must be distributed to those who want to use it in productive ways. However, there are many barriers to the widespread use of EOS during a public emergency:

• The data sets are very large;
• Expertise is needed to process and interpret the information;
• Information is difficult to locate;
• Intellectual property rights restrictions for scenes which have been value-added cannot be easily honored in an emergency;
• Scenes need to be integrated with other data-sets for many applications; and
• Many important potential users are not aware that the information exists.

During the early phases of a public emergency, information is typically scattered, contradictory, and incomplete. The effectiveness of emergency operations in large part depends on how quickly public agencies can obtain organized, accurate information and communicate this information to the public. One of the objectives of this cooperative agreement proposal is to help facilitate the widespread promulgation of specifically targeted NASA information to those who need it during a public emergency.

To promulgate NASA material effectively in an emergency, the information must be in a form which can be quickly and easily understood by those who need it, so it is useful to examine distribution possibilities and methods to improve the existent emergency information processes to accommodate systemic demands which would result from inclusion of NASA data.

"Because of the immediate humanitarian and economic effects of natural disasters it is critical that NASA act now to pursue practical applications in partnership with the responsible operational U.S. government agencies." [MTPE]

The most well known publicly accessible emergency information system is the Emergency Alert System (EAS), previously the Emergency Broadcast System, managed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). As the Emergency Broadcast System was developed before computers became an important form of communication, EAS does not have the ability to transmit large data sets such as NASA images.

An efficient way to deliver NASA information to emergency service workers would be to produce a system analogous to the EAS for use on computer networks. This approach has a number of advantages:

• The existence of NASA information potentially helpful in a public emergency can be advertised to those who need it when they need it most;
• The system can be designed to give pointers to individuals in both the private and public sector who have the expertise necessary to manipulate and interpret information provided by NASA;
• Pre-negotiated intellectual property rights would free those who need information in an emergency from the need to negotiate complex contracts under pressure, thus encouraging the use of NASA imagery;
• Media and government entities would have timely access to current information; and
• The public would have access to up-to-date regional information in the form of georeferenced text, cartography, and images.

Flood Emergency Response

During the 1995 and 1997 California floods, the California Resources Agency gained practical experience in providing information to the public during an emergency. We integrated constantly changing information from our own departments and multiple other sources onto custom-designed web pages. Rapidly changing parameters included the amount of water in California's rivers and streams from our Department of Water Resources, road and weather conditions from the California Department of Transportation, and alerts from the Governor's Office of Emergency Services.

We found that the public needed real-time integration of information sets from multiple sources for a comprehensive situational overview. Unfortunately, during some of the most widespread and expensive disasters in California's history, CERES was unable to locate imagery that had pragmatic applications in spite of the motivation of the State and NASA to work together. The necessary infrastructure to locate and effectively use NASA information did not exist. This has created a mutual desire of the State of California and various divisions of NASA to address a fundamental infrastructure need.

Perhaps NASA could best meet the emergency services component of the Mission to Planet Earth by putting its information into a national system which could be used by emergency service workers, allowing NASA to leverage the large investment being made in emergency services infrastructure across the country. Had the system proposed in this CAN been in place in 1997, the devastation of the floods both in California and the rest of the nation would most certainly have been reduced.

Fire Emergency Response

In the last decade fire has played a major role in the destruction of timbered resources and recreational opportunities. During September 1987, lightning fires throughout Oregon and California burned 900,000 acres of timber and brushlands. This was not the start nor the finish of the fire season in the western US, where exceptionally low fuel moisture caused by record drought and aggravated by recent heavy mortality in some ecosystems produced the single worst year of wildfires in history. Unfortunately, 1988 continued with major wildland fires in Yellowstone National Park and national forests throughout the west.

Despite the impact of forest fires in the last 10 years, chronic wildfires have posed a greater threat at the interface of wildland and urban development. History has shown that since the disastrous Bel Air fire of 1961, which burned 484 homes in Los Angeles, notable wildfires with heavy structural losses have burned through portions of Santa Barbara (1964), 40,000 hectares of southeastern San Diego County (1970), Mandeville Canyon and parts of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles County (1978), the City of Bradbury (1980), suburbs of San Bernardino (1980), 48,000 hectares of Ventura County and 2000 homes in the Oakland hills. The 1970 Clampitt and Wright fires, 1978 Kanan, 1992 Dayton and the 1985 Decker and Piuma fires all burned across the Santa Monica Mountains to the Pacific Ocean at Malibu. Common ingredients in these fires have been vegetation stress, low fuel moisture, heavy biomass accumulations, and severe fire weather.

Even though fuel type, condition, and topography play critical roles in the incidence and behavior of major fires, there is no coherent program that provides timely synoptic measurements on which to base fire management decisions. EOS data available on AM-1 and future missions and EOS-DIS can provide the technology required to use remotely sensed data for fire management and emergency response. We propose a partnership of government and other professionals in the emergency response, remote sensing, information technology, and management areas to develop and demonstrate the implementation of an emergency management system using EOS technology for fires in California. Emergency response requirements will be developed using fire management as a template for other emergencies such as floods, earthquakes, and environmental hazards.

Information delivery through stressed telecommunication infrastructure

All the recent natural disasters in California have been accompanied by a loss of telecommunications. Heavy rains flood phone closets, and earthquakes tear microwave towers from their sensitive alignments. All major emergencies create high telecommunication demands which overload systems both on the Internet and in the conventional switched telephone network.

New consumer satellite technologies allow very fast downloads of large amounts of information. These systems use a satellite dish for downloads from the Internet and a terrestrial telephone line with a modem to send information into the Internet. Using a RF modem and packet radio, we can produce a system which is inexpensive, independent of terrestrial phone lines, and capable of downloading EOS information at low cost.

If EOS is to be successful in the natural hazards area, it will need to solve the issues surrounding fault tolerant access to the images produced by the system. CaLSIP proposes to place inexpensive systems with consumer satellite receivers in eighteen flood-prone contiguous counties in the Central Valley.

Objectives

• design a user interface between CERES and EOS-DIS for browsing, downloading, and local caching of data;
• develop EOS products for emergency response focusing on pre-event and post-event requirements;
• test developments on planned and unplanned emergency scenarios;
• train emergency response and management personnel in the use of the EOS data and EOS-DIS technology; and
• develop feedback mechanisms for driving EOS/EOS-DIS requirements in the future as related to emergency response.

Use of EOS Data for Emergency Response

This technology development and transfer is possible because of prior advances in remote measurement of biophysical properties in agriculture and natural ecosystems. These include estimates of leaf area index (Tucker, 1979; Hatfield et al.,1987; Peterson et al., 1987), vegetation water content or moisture stress (Vogelmann and Rock, 1986; Hunt et al., 1987), and biomass structure (Paris and Kwong 1987, Paris et al., 1987; Esteman and Paris, 1987). Recent cooperative research and applications with the State of California, NASA/ARC, and the U.S. Forest Service has investigated emergency management approaches using remote sensing and information technology. These activities have supported most recently earthquake, flood, and fire applications and have resulted in major advances in sensor, telemetry, and data utilization (Brass et al., 1997; Ambrosia et al.; 1996).

The State of California, NASA/ARC, and the U.S. Forest Service have a history of successful applications and technology development projects that have introduced a cadre of land managers and emergency response personnel to remote sensing technology and information systems (Peterson et al., 1980; Tosta-Miller and Peterson, 1980; Pillsbury et al., 1981; Brass and Ambrosia, 1987). CaLSIP will draw upon this experience and expertise in developing the technology and applications described in this CAN.

EOS products will provide valuable data sets for land cover and fuel mapping. Fire management requires the identification of the type of fuel burning as well as the surrounding land use. The AM-1 MODIS level 3 product will provide 17 land cover parameters based on the IGBP global vegetation database. This database defines nine categories of natural vegetation, three classes of developed lands, two classes of mosaic lands and three classes of non-vegetated lands. This data will be available 18 months after launch, produced at a 1 km resolution on a quarterly basis. This data set will be examined closely for use in the fuel mapping activity, replacing the approach described earlier in the proposal. The MODIS data set will require translation into classes found in the National Fire Danger Rating System. The translation will require fuel experts within the State of California to become familiar with the IGBP classification and by using experience and guidelines in the NFDRS rename the classes using field validation.

An important consideration in the fuel mapping procedure will be to update the information on an annual basis. MODIS Level 3 land cover change parameters will be used to quantify subtle and progressive land-surface transformations and major rapid changes. Using multispectral-multitemporal data vectors with models of vegetation change mechanisms MODIS data will recognize the type of change and the intensity. The change analysis data will be incorporated in the fuels database to identify major changes in fuel type and land use change on a statewide basis. MODIS data will also provide the basis for monitoring the post event management. Ecosystem recovery from fire, receding floodwaters and erosion mitigation will be identified and tracked as the level 3 MODIS land cover change product becomes available. The California Resources Agency will find with the MODIS product a readily available change detection technology which will be incorporated yearly into the existing statewide database for resource change monitoring.

The suite of EOS sensors on AM-1 offers a unique opportunity to detect and monitor thermal anomalies on a daily and weekly basis. In the case of wildland fire, the State of California has the opportunity to monitor large areas of the state with the MODIS and ASTER sensors. The thermal anomalies product from MODIS will describe fire occurrence day and night, fire location and fire intensity (energy calculation) on a daily basis. These parameters are collected at 1-km resolution using the special fire channel at 3.9 micrometers and the 11 micrometer high saturation channel. This data correlated with ASTER's five thermal IR channels (when coincident data sets are available) will provide the State with timely regional coverage for rapid fire detection and monitoring. This data set will be integrated into the existing Office of Emergency Services and the Resource Agency's fire monitoring system for near real time detection and characterization of fires. Combined with the State's ground based automated lightning detection system and TRMM LIS satellite based system, which generates a single lighting product that describes the storm location, precipitation estimates, lightning frequency and location, and electrical output on a 5 km by 5 km grid, individual storm fronts could be monitored for potential lightning caused fires, catching the fires soon after they are started. The early warning aspect of this system would save the state millions of dollars and most certainly homes and lives.

During the 5 year effort, prescribed fires will be used to test and evaluate the fire detection system and train emergency response personnel in the use of EOS products and EOS-DIS for data retrieval. Numerous fuel management fires are lit each year throughout the state. These burns will provide an important opportunity to test data products (determine detection limits of MODIS and ASTER data) and data access for near real time monitoring of fire events. Resource and emergency response personnel can participate in the use of the EOS system being developed by the State and gain hands-on experience in its use. This opportunity will also provide the user community with a direct link to the EOS development team for new system requirements and data types. Following training and experience with EOS, the system will be integrated into the State's emergency response planning and management program, attempting to use EOS data for actual disaster response. At the conclusion of this activity the State of California and its emergency management teams will have had an opportunity to test NASA's EOS and EOS-DIS under simulated and actual disasters. It will then be necessary to develop and operational plan for adoption of this technology by the emergency response community.

Land Use Planning

Background

In 1994 the State of California debuted the California Environmental Resources Evaluation System (CERES), http://ceres.ca.gov, an information system that is similar in structure and function to a WP-ESIP III. It is sustained within the California Resources Agency, http://ceres.ca.gov/cra/, the State governmental entity responsible for the conservation, enhancement, and management of California's natural and cultural resources, including land, water, wildlife, parks, minerals, and historic sites. The motivation was bottom-up driven. Government agencies, public interest groups, and private industry acknowledged the need for accessible, science-based information to inform decision-makers about natural resources. They recognized that collaboration among these sectors would optimize the use and availability of existing data to enhance analytical capabilities and to promote more efficient collections of new data. While plentiful information existed throughout the state in various locations and formats, it was difficult to find.

The California Resources Agency, with a work force of 15,000 and an annual budget of approximately $2 billion, addressed this problem by creating CERES, a system which uses Internet technology to coordinate data and promote public involvement in decision-making. CERES' goal is to improve environmental analysis and planning by integrating natural and cultural resource information from multiple contributors and by making it available and useful to a wide variety of users. CERES' Land Use Planning Information Network (LUPIN), http://ceres.ca.gov/planning, provides an aggregate view of California's land use and environmental planning information for planners, local and regional governments, conservationists, developers, landowners, and others. LUPIN is specifically designed to help meet California's unique land use information needs by providing unprecedented access to planning documents, reports and publications, legal and regulatory information, and other essential data which enable people to identify and assess the cumulative impact of planning decisions. This proposal seeks WP-ESIP III funding to help incorporate EOS data and services into CERES and LUPIN.

CERES combines efforts and products of many contributors into one integrated, comprehensive system so that accurate and timely information is available for prudent policy development and decision making. CERES' innovative applications increase public use of technology throughout the population; it seeks to make public information more readily available to all interested parties and to improve speed and efficiency in management, research, and education.

CERES Activities and Achievements

1. CERES coordinates the establishment of a distributed data repository of diverse data holdings of California to enable storage, retrieval, and analysis of information. CERES has improved the access and expanded the relevancy of both spatial data and point data to advance the science of data management and metadata cataloging by encouraging cooperation among governmental, educational, and private groups.
2. CERES is partnered with organizations to advance the social and economic interests of Californians by the involvement of diverse public and private entities including individuals and groups who have traditionally been excluded from the decision-making process, such as those located in less affluent or rural locations. CERES is increasing public awareness of resources issues and available information.
3. CERES is searching for and integrating distributed environmental data and is supporting research about ecosystem relationships to improve effectiveness of inventory and monitoring approaches. By promoting cost-sharing, interdepartmental cooperation, and increased governmental efficiency, CERES facilitates improved productivity and reduced cost. CERES initiates and becomes involved with pilot projects intended to expand the use of spatial data, including remote sensing data, and information systems to improve the quality and responsiveness of resource management in California.
4. CERES is sharing its experience with others to promote transferability of the program components. A demonstration project in the 1997-98 Governor's Budget proposes to extend cost-effective GIS technologies and remote sensing data to land use planners and other users at the local, county level. (At the time of this writing, the State Legislative Budget is pending final approval.) The state of Colorado is but one example of a sister program closely patterned and built upon CERES' experiences. CERES has recently been invited to make presentations at three national conferences to share its experiences with other. We believe other states can be patterned after our WP-ESIP but also emulate the integration of the ESIP into the entire state's information infrastructure.
5. CERES supports and participates in initiatives that facilitate, integrate, and assimilate data, including data identified under the NASA MTPE banner. CERES is actively promoting interfaces between these data within GISs and other technologies presently in use by other Federal agencies, state and local governments, value-added companies, private sector users, and various non-governmental organizations (NGO's). CERES is also providing free, public access to a comprehensive inventory of California's environmental resources.
6. CERES has an active outreach component. Its staff regularly designs and produces new exhibits, images, handouts, and materials that highlight various aspects of the CERES program. CERES submits articles to state and national professional journals, publications, and newsletters. In the past 12 months alone, CERES staff developed and gave presentations at more than 40 local, state, and national conferences, meetings, exhibits, forums and conventions.

Objectives

• enabling distributed, interagency access to information and analysis tools, including searching, cataloguing, retrieval, analysis, and display functions;
• identifying data and technology gaps and developing strategies to address them;
• assuring data systems are interoperable and developed at a minimum cost;
• identifying cost sharing opportunities and encouraging cost savings from shared resources (i.e., high cost items such as satellite imagery and digital aerial photography);
• bringing together and making available an inventory of existing information and encouraging the integration of new data;
• demonstrating the utility of selected EOS datasets for land planning and agricultural applications;
• enabling distributed, interagency access to information and analysis tools, including searching, cataloguing, retrieval, analysis, and display functions;
• ensuring current information updates;
• reducing redundancy and duplication of efforts;
• improving broad public access to data;
• providing support for multiple end-user applications including parcel evaluation, permitting, environmental assessment and monitoring, ensuring water supply/quality, strategic growth management, and agricultural operations;
• improving efficiencies to accommodate increased workloads/understaffed conditions;
• promulgating appropriate standards in GIS, metadata, software, and electronic planning documentation; and
• developing or contributing to the development of local and state information and analysis standards that are consistent with federal standards.

Use of EOS Data in Land Planning

LUPIN is an example of how CERES makes Earth resource data easy to preserve, locate, and access. It facilitates the use and fusion of diverse data holdings in California for practical applications, assisting in identifying the overall impact of planning decisions; identifying information and data quality needed to support land use; and providing outreach to encourage broad awareness, access, and utilization of the network. LUPIN actively solicits and responds to user assessment. Its content and priorities have been guided in part through user feedback and suggestions, and LUPIN continues to welcome and seek suggestions on identification and refinement of information sources and materials through an extensive outreach program, on-line email response forms, and an on-line questionnaire. The staff is responsive to local needs and works with local entities, offering individualized pages for each of California's 58 counties providing a single point of access to a library of information including county profiles; county general plans and zoning ordinances; economic and demographic information; data about species, habitat and vegetation types, infrastructure, planning reports and publications from state and federal agencies; and environmental laws.

Because of its successful history in working with land use planning decision-makers, LUPIN was designated the lead on a Governor's Budget Initiative: a Regional GIS Coordination Demonstration Project involving eight California counties. (Criteria for the selection of these counties include an agricultural base, transitional economy, and planning for growth and change.) The goal of this State project is to provide the information needed to produce regional plans in support of sound land use planning and well-informed management decisions. It will implement a prototype distributed GIS system and provide technical expertise to those at the county level. A broad community of users will be able to access/combine local datasets maintained at multiple locations, and there will be improved interoperability among disparate geographic information systems. Availability, accessibility, exchange, and distribution of geographic information and analysis tools will be increased. This project has been approved for inclusion in the 1997-98 California State Budget which is currently pending final adoption by the California Legislature. The funding for FY 97-98 is $700,000 and for FY 98-99, $136,000.

Key data requirements of the LUPIN project generally and the GIS project in particular, that are totally or in part derivable from EOS data, include:

• Urban encroachment from Land Cover/Use Change data
• Crop yield from Vegetation Dynamics and Precipitation
• Erosion modeled from Precipitation, Snow Cover, and corollary GIS data
• Regional land cover map from 30m or 1km Landsat combined with crop production, land use change records, and water use
• Wildland fire, including recovery, regeneration, water yield, and erosion components, derived from Fire Occurrence, Land Cover/Use Change, Vegetation Dynamics, and Precipitation
• Water yield and recreational uses from Snow Cover data

Although the framework library contains significant portions of data for use by many different applications, there will be special project data or other locally administered datasets that will not be integrated into the framework. Additionally, counties, cities, districts, and other entities will have their own significant information holdings which will not be incorporated into the framework but instead gatewayed to all QUAIL users via the information nodes. Thus these information nodes which comprise user application access points into the framework will also serve as providers of additional data and processing resources. At the same they provide the system user with tools for locating, accessing, analyzing, and visualizing environmental information.