LTER GIS Meeting Summary

Meeting notes and summary by Theresa Valentine (Theresa.Valentine@orst.edu)- H.J. Andrews LTER.

Resulting from an organizational workshop at the 2000 LTER All Scientists meeting, this report is the result of a two day follow-on meeting of GIS issues related to LTER Network Information System developement.

Meeting Notes:

The meeting was organized by the LTER Network Office and hosted and cofunded by the San Diego Supercomputing Center.  The following people attended the meeting:

Todd Ackerman, Peter Arzberger, Mike Bailey, Kirsten Barber, Chaitan Baru, Bryan Baker, Tim Craig, Tony Fountain,  Dylan Keon, Radha Kunda, Bertram Ludäscher, Peter McCartney, Ashraf Memon, Barbara Nolen, Deanna Pennington, Ken Ramsey, Ming Tsou, Theresa Valentine, John Vande Castle, Ilya Zaslavsky

The meeting agenda is available on this link.

There were representatives from four LTER sites, the LTER Network Office, San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC), Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering (NACSE), and Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI).

During the introduction, ideas were captured about current issues the individual sites were facing and some larger picture issues.  These issues were used to frame our discussions and build the breakout groups during the workshop. 

Each of the LTER sites represented at the meeting presented their current status and ongoing projects.  Sites represented were the HJ Andrews, Niwot Ridge/Green Lakes Valley, Central Arizona - Phoenix Urban,  Jornada Basin, and the Network Office. The status of Internet GIS on the sites ranged from ArcIMS applications built in-house to development work by contractors. Many of the sites that did not attend do not have any Internet GIS applications in development. We discovered that we have similar needs and problems, and we are not working together enough to sharing ideas, solutions, and development costs.

The next segment of the meeting consisted of several presentations on emerging technologies and applications in the Internet GIS/Mapping/Service world. There were presentations on the following topics:

 The group then divided into smaller groups to discuss the following topics in depth:

Each group presented their finding back to the larger group.  Recommendations to the LTER Information Management Executive Committee (IMExec) were developed and workgroups developed for future collaborations.

 Recommendations and Assignments:

 1.  Further development on spatial data workbench. Develop the Spatial Data Workbench Wish List into a vision (Peter McCartney to take to NIS committee) This was completed at the workshop. 

2. Statement about LTER spatial data standards for LTER (Todd Ackerman).  This includes the metadata standards as well as recommendations on what basic level of GIS data should be available on the web for download. These standards will be incorporated into the overal design of the LTER Network Information System.

3. Push for providing data via some type of map service (Peter McCartney to start write  up for report)

4. Develop plan of action for the All Scientist Meeting in September: 

 Resources needed:

1. Need resources for implementing 2 and 3  (need to identify what resources we need)
2. Need to survey LTER sites: (committee, Theresa Valentine lead)
3. Survey existing map services out there…(Dylan Keon, and Ilya Zaslavsk )

A list of terms used in this document is available.

Webpage created June 1, 2003, V1.1 last modified June 4, 2003 - John Vande Castle