GAP Helps Promote Great Outdoors

Mapping the Nation: GIS for Federal Progress 

and Accountability showcases many

ways that federal government agencies 

rely on GIS analysis and maps.  Map image

and text from the GAP Analysis website,
"Mapping the Nation" page.

USGS Core Science Systems' Gap Analysis Program (GAP), which provides important biodiversity data as well as information regarding the protection status of native U.S. species, has been actively involved in Secretary Salazar's efforts to promote the President's America's Great Outdoors Initiative.  As the Secretary and his senior staff visited the Governors of each state this spring, their briefing materials included GAP maps illustrating the State’s Federal and State land ownership boundaries.  The maps were created by expert cartographers and wildlife ecologists in the GAP Moscow, Idaho office using GAP Protected Areas and Species Distribution databases.  These colorful and informative maps will soon be available to the public in large and small formats on the Gap Analysis Web site.

New NBII Search Debut

The week of August 10, the USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) launched a new search engine. The new NBII search is designed to support the discovery of and provide access to critical national and global biological information and data. The new NBII search engine is based on the Vivisimo Velocity search platform and features dynamic clustering, faceted searching, extensive source control, integration with the NBII LIFE image library, and the ability to simultaneously search critical global and national biodiversity resources such as the Global Biological Information Facility (GBIF), Amphibiaweb, and the Missouri Botanical’s TROPICOS database. The new NBII search supports flexible information acquisition through web site/database crawling and real time federated resource searching. Finally, the new NBII search supports the custom development of multiple information indexes, geospatial integration with Google Maps, visualization, and flexible control over search result displays. The new NBII search is available on the NBII Portal at http://www.nbii.gov/.