USGS:Biology Biological Informatics Program Vegetation Characterization Program Products by Theme Tools

TOOLS

MetaMaker is a metadata data entry program which is freely available for downloading from http://metadata.nbii.gov/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=255&&PageID=338&mode=2&in_hi_userid=2&cached=true.

The Plots Database is a set of software tools developed under contract from the USGS Center for Biological Informatics by The Nature Conservancy and now maintained by NatureServe for field data collection and analysis. It is available for downloading. This software may potentially be used as the tool for aiding in the expansion and refinement of the lower levels of the National Vegetation Classification Standard. (Future plans include making this software available as an interactive web based program.)

Geographic Resource Analysis Support System (GRASS) is a Geographic Information System (GIS) tool for data management, image processing, graphics production, spatial modelling, and visualization of many types of data. There are several sources of information relating to GRASS, including:

Baylor University, Waco, Texas The official web site for the GRASS Research Group

The GRASS Information Center at the Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.

US Army Corps of Engineers, Construction Engineering Research Laboratories

GRASSLAND A commercial windows based GIS package based around GRASS command language for the Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms.

Blackland GRASS A Commercial program which allows any 32-bit INTEL-PC user (WIN 95/NT) to access a GRASS database and manipulate data much like the UNIX GRASS program.

Open GIS Specification (OGIS) is an approach to creating geoprocessing interoperability within the distributed architecture of the Internet, despite incompatible formats and data structures.