Finding Great Lakes Science: Three USGS Data Tools

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) is a multidisciplinary, interagency effort to protect and restore the Great Lakes using the best science and lessons from earlier studies. The U.S. Geological Survey contributes scientific expertise and delivers information and tools that help resource managers meet restoration goals.

The initiative's interagency reach is a strength, but it makes it hard to coordinate the many restoration projects run by governments, tribes, universities, nonprofits and industry, and the flood of biological, geological, geospatial and water data they produce. The USGS builds web tools to make that data easy to find, understand and use, to encourage sharing and collaboration.

Science in the Great Lakes (SiGL) Mapper

wim.usgs.gov/SiGL: a map-based discovery tool that shows monitoring and research across all five Great Lakes by the USGS and its partners, with searchable detail on what, where, when and how data were collected, and links to data repositories, publications and contacts. It aims to:

• support strategic data collection, making existing work visible, revealing places and topics that need more study, and letting new projects build on old data;
• show activities on a map, so people without geographic information systems can see and share where research is happening;
• connect datasets large and small, linking to big repositories such as ScienceBase or simply showing descriptions and contacts for smaller datasets not online.

As of April 1, 2015, SiGL held 257 projects (53 with monitoring sites and 204 without, including every USGS GLRI project) from 65 federal and state agencies, municipalities, tribes, universities and nonprofits.

The USGS GLRI website

cida.usgs.gov/glri: an outreach and discovery site for USGS GLRI projects, publications and datasets, describing about 75 projects, 66 publications and 11 datasets. Its content lives in ScienceBase, the USGS data-cataloguing and management platform, so scientists and outreach staff can update project information without web-development skills, changes appear on the site automatically, and partners' sites and tools, such as SiGL, can reuse the content.

Environmental Data Discovery and Transformation (EnDDaT)

cida.usgs.gov/enddat: as environmental models have grown more detailed, they need far more data, often in real or near-real time for forecasting, and finding, combining and processing that data has become a bottleneck. EnDDaT retrieves publicly available data through standard web services, combines sources, performs common transformations, and offers several output formats, visualisations, and services that plug directly into modelling software, all through one web interface.

Contacts

Jessica M. Lucido, USGS Center for Integrated Data Analytics (GLRI website and EnDDaT); Jennifer L. Bruce, USGS Wisconsin Water Science Center (SiGL).

Sources

• Jessica M. Lucido and Jennifer Bruce, Tools for discovering and accessing Great Lakes scientific data, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2015–3040. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/fs20153040
• Screenshots of the tools, including maps on commercial base maps, are not reproduced here.