Project Title: Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative Geospatial Data Portal Extension: Implementing a GNLCC Spatial Toolkit and Phenology Server Project PI(s) (who is doing the work; contact information): Tim Kern, Web Applications Team Lead, Colin Talbert, GIS Analyst Information Science Branch Fort Collins Science Center 2150 Centre Ave, Building C, Fort Collins, CO 80526 970-226-9366 kernt@usgs.gov/talbertc@usgs.gov Project Coordinator (contact information): Yvette Converse (Yvette_Converse@fws.gov) Sean Finn (Sean_Finn@fws.gov) Partners (name, affiliation, location): Jeff Morisette, Assistant Center Director Fort Collins Science Center 2150 Centre Ave, Building C, Fort Collins, CO 80526 970-226-9144 morisettej@usgs.gov Project Summary: This project has two related parts. The first part, the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) Spatial Toolkit, will extend the current GNLCC Geospatial Data Portal and allow users to generate dynamic interactive map viewers, modeled output, and web services for use in ArcExplorer and other client tools. The second part of the project, the GNLCC Phenology Service, will add a full suite of satellite-based land surface phenology data for use in ArcMap and other client tools through ESRI image services to the Geospatial Data Portal. Need: The existing Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) geospatial data portal addresses two major concern faced by any multiple large-scale multi-agency data integration project: 1) collecting/compiling datasets in a coordinated fashion and 2) providing stakeholder with easy access to critical data and derived products. The current system will provide users with a way to upload, edit, manage and share their geospatial data, and ensures that project data products have a review, approval, and distribution avenue. This proposed work will add significant analysis capability to the existing geospatial data portal, enhancing data integration among partner datasets. It will be applicable across the entire range of the GNLCC, including all US states and Canadian provinces. As the existing data catalog and repository grows, the site will reference hundreds of datasets. These data will include native items (GNLCC-sponsored projects), partner datasets (GNLCC-associated agencies hosting data from their servers), and reference data from large clearinghouses (ESRI, National Map, etc.). The GNLCC needs ways to organize, analyze and display project data in a coherent way. Our proposed work will also address challenge of accessing and working with large imagery compilations. We will focus with data-access tools that can help modelers and analysts assess the effect of climate change. In many cases, image libraries are not easily accessible to analysts. Format, file size, and access routes can present significant challenges to those with the greatest need for these data. In many analysis scenarios, specialists need to access climate-related data such as phenology, evaluate these data in context with other community themes, and then present the results as a combined view to the community. The proposed effort will provide such tools. Objective: All GNLCC projects need access to the data developed by other members of the community. This was the incentive to build the GNLCC Geospatial Data Portal. The portal, currently a repository, working
space, and catalog for several hundred data themes, provides an opportunity for scientists to develop derivative and original projects. However, many times these data do not stand alone. The value and utility of these data will be enhanced significantly when authors are provided with tools to afford geospatial context, visualization, and analysis to the data consumers. In addition, many of these projects would benefit from the incorporation of data-intensive image services. Through this proposal, the Fort Collins Science Center will help the Great Northern Landscape Conservation Cooperative (GNLCC) address a significant data integration challenge presentation of context and tools for addressing phonology data in analyses. This work would allow landscape-level evaluation by GIS specialists, modelers, and resource professionals alike. Planned Accomplishments The set of data development and presentation tools planned will allow GIS analysts in the GNLCC community to work with multiple themes inside the GNLCC geospatial portal. Users will be able to work with phenology imagery layers, define presentation options, and deliver on-line viewers that can be used by the GNLCC community at large and, ultimately, the public. In the course of this effort, FORT will: engineer a set of spatial tools to allow GNLCC GIS analysts to manage visualization options and data packaging for the GNLCC project geodatabase; expose the NASA multi-year phenology imagery layers to ArcMap and ArcExplorer users in a format that allows for analysis of the data on local computers; present project geodatabase and visualization packages to other community viewers and decision support systems; provide metadata development tools for these combined map services, allowing users to track the origin of the visualizations, and to test the data behind the analysis; and, document methods and approach for application to other projects. Methods: The objectives of this proposal, the development of a spatial toolkit and the implementation of a phenology imagery server, will build upon the existing GNLCC Geospatial Data Portal and USGS ScienceBase projects. ScienceBase is an active project that includes catalog, repository, and geospatial data share functionality. Features built by the ScienceBase project feed into the GNLCC components, and technologies designed as a part of the GNCC geospatial data portal seed the development of new ScienceBase features. The ScienceBase/GNLCC repository is currently focused on habitat themes (species Figure 1 GNLCC geospatial data portal and ScienceBase Cataloging interaction range and habitat connectivity), and also includes hydrologic, geologic, physiographic, and administrative datasets. To build the spatial toolkit, the Fort Collins Science Center Web Applications Team will use the ESRI Java API, as well as the development framework used for the current data portal and ScienceBase components. The current source code uses a number of open source components, many of which that
would be employed in this extension. The tooklkit would provide geospatial data portal users a way to design and deliver analyses, and not just datasets. Figure 2: a) b) c) As a reference implementation, this project would build a way for GIS users and modelers to access and use satellite-based phenology maps. Phenology refers to recurring plant and animal life cycle stages, such as leafing and flowering, maturation of agricultural plants, emergence of insects, and migration of birds (USA NPN). Many of these events are both sensitive to climatic variation and important to land management actions (Morisette et al., 2009). Landscape phenology from satellite data provide consistent, wall-to-wall coverage of plant seasonality and can be used to evaluate the vegetation on preserved areas in the context of surrounding lands. It also provides information on both intra- and interannual variability. Figure 1a shows an example of satellite vegetation index data over Yellowstone. Figure 1b shows the phenology metrics that are extracted from the satellite time series through the latest NASA processing (Tan et al., 2010). Figure 1c shows an example image of the length of the growing season in 2005 throughout the US. This project will provide a series of ESRI Image services, covering the entire suite of phenology data. ESRI image services differ from other geospatial data services in that they can readily be consumed by applications which required access to the full data. These services would be used to supply not only online tools and visualization but also used directly in ArcMap to drive raster based geoprocessing operation. By delivering phenology data as a series of ESRI Image services these data would be readily accessible to users, scale well to large volumes of data, provide full raster processing functionality, and integrate seamlessly with the ESRI line of geospatial software. The phenology image service would serve the 40+ phenology layers for each year since 2001. These datasets originally come from individual high dynamic range (HRD) files generated by NASA. The individual files were merged to create a wall-to-wall coverage of the Continental United States. The images will be loaded into a ArcGIS Image Server implementation. The Image Server and the customized tools necessary to intelligently serve these data will be built by the Fort Collins Science Center GIS Team. The Fort Collins Science Center Invasive Species Branch will consult with the GIS Team on the best ways to present and use these data for analysis.
Deliverables: This project will: continue to support the GNLCC geospatial data portal, including the versioned project geodatabase and ArcGIS Server cluster; provide a way for GIS Analysts to access phenology imagery data to develop derived products and store these artifacts in the project repository; augment the existing ArcGIS Server cluster to support the generation of multi-theme web services, providing a way for users to develop and store map service definitions on the geospatial data portal; provide a system to allow GIS Analysts to conveniently define dataset presentation options, including symbology, attribute-based representation, and access restrictions; provide an expert workflow where ArcGIS analysts and modelers can design and deploy their own Web or client application by calling Web Services from the GNLCC repository and catalog; provide a "straight to the mapper" approach, designed to let a user call up and interactively select and display layers on a client tool, like Arc Explorer; and, develop format, structure, and methodology for documenting map packages as distinct artifacts associated with the project. This project will provide significant flexibility in visualization definition and inclusion of imagery products. It will also allow the community present data products to communities beyond GNLCC, and enable the technology developed for the GNLCC to scale to other projects. Schedule: This schedule is based on the start date of the project. The earliest this project could start is May, 2011. Deliverable Continued Support for Existing Geospatial Data Portal Implement Phenology Server Add map service definition file handling Add map visualization generation options and tools Add expert map viewer workflow Add non-arcgis map view workflow Add ArcExplorer support Provide National Map integration Provide full project documentation Target Delivery Date Ongoing 3 months after start of project 1 month after start of project 3 months after start of project 6 months after start of project 6 months after start of project 8 months after start of project 11 months after start of project 12 months after start of project
References: Morisette, J. A. Richardson et al., 2009, Learning the rhythm of the seasons in the face of global change: phenological research provides the key. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 7(5): 253-260. Tan, Bin, JT Morisette, RE Wolfe, F Gao, GA Ederer, J Nightingale, and JA Pedelty, 2010. An Enhanced TIMESAT Algorithm for Estimating Vegetation Phenology Metrics From MODIS Data, IEEE J. or Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. In press. USA NPN, 2011. United States of America National Phenology Network, www.usanpn.org, visited 3/1/11.