• The National Map
• National Geospatial Program
• Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
• National Atlas

Fiscal Year 2012 Highlights

Agreements

      Elevation

• Natural Resources Conservation Service - Partnership to acquire over 564 square miles of lidar over portions of Somerset and Wicomico Counties in Maryland to support multiple studies including flood analysis and response, vegetation mapping, structures mapping, land use planning, and habitat modeling by providing data for analysis.
• Federal Emergency Management Agency, Natural Resources Conservation Service - Partnership to acquire over 3,942 square miles of lidar over areas in Federal Emergency Management Agency Region 3 to support multiple studies including flood analysis and response, vegetation mapping, structures mapping, land use planning, and habitat modeling by providing data for analysis in Allegany, Washington, and Frederick Counties.

FGDC CAP Grant Support

• The Center for GIS at Towson University - (Category 3: Expanding the State GIS Inventory) - The project will strengthen Maryland's statewide GIS inventory by leading a two-phase partnership project to populate the GIS Inventory with Federal Geographic Data Committee compliant metadata for nationally significant geospatial data themes. In the first phase, the Center for GIS (CGIS) will concentrate on seven key State agencies and two local jurisdictions that maintain nationally significant datasets, have established a considerable GIS presence in the State, and are likely to have associated Web services and freely available data. In the second phase, CGIS will strengthen participation in the GIS Inventory by determining the local and State agencies that have not yet participated in the GIS Inventory.
• Maryland Department of Planning - (Category 4: Fifty States Initiative: Business Plan Development and Implementation) - The project will develop a business plan for the State of Maryland that will define the implementation framework for enhanced statewide parcel data development, enhancement, and distribution. The State has made extensive investments in parcel mapping to date, including the development of the first statewide parcel point database linked to real property data. There is a need to integrate county and statewide parcel mapping activities, enhance the existing cadastral data to support GIS and tax assessment mapping applications, and to develop a long-term maintenance approach that is not dependent on data sales and which enables statewide parcel data to be made widely available.
• The Center for GIS at Towson University - (Category 7: Geospatial Platform Cloud Service Testbed) - This project will deploy Maryland's latest base map data in a cloud-based Web service that will enable comparison of usability, performance, scalability, and cost between the cloud and the State's current Maryland iMap hosting environment. Maryland iMap is Maryland's public-facing enterprise GIS infrastructure for providing mapping applications, products, and services online that assist citizens and government employees with managing and presenting data linked to a location. Performance will be tested both in a controlled manner that utilizes Web stress tools to quantify the differences between the two hosting environments and in a follow-on phase that encourages real-world use of the system for mobile applications. Evaluating how the cloud-hosted system can best be deployed to meet performance expectations at the lowest costs aligns with the Federal Geographic Data Committee Geospatial Line of Business goals to optimize and consolidate Federal geospatial investments by reducing costs and improving services to citizens.

Other Activities

• Science Support - Assisted USGS biology, geology, and water scientists in obtaining imagery, elevation, and other geospatial data.
• 3D Elevation Program Inventory - Validated information on known datasets and documented new datasets to update the national inventory of high-resolution elevation data - http://www.csc.noaa.gov/inventory/.
• Outreach - Conducted and coordinated National Geospatial Program outreach activities by attending a range of meetings, participating in conferences, and coordinating trainings and workshops to support the geospatial community in the State.
• Emergency Response - Liaisons provide general geospatial data discovery and acquisition assistance during emergencies as those events occur throughout the fiscal year.