USGS Home Contact USGS Search USGS

Maps, Imagery, and Publications Hazards Newsroom Education Jobs Partnerships Library About USGS Podcasts/RSS

Synopses of Listening Session Contributions

The following summaries are synopses of oral or written statements made by individuals representing the indicated organizations. Summaries emphasize those comments for which the USGS is being asked to respond or take action. Statements are in alphabetical order, non-governmental organizations first, followed by bureaus of the Department of the Interior, other Federal agencies, and others.

American Farm Bureau Federation

• Continue to provide resource assessments, analysis and monitoring in support of planting and harvesting decisions.
• Work with the states to develop water quality studies and monitoring systems to identify impure waters within the states.
• Determine which non-native species are harmful both environmentally and economically and therefore considered invasive.
• Play a leading role in identifying how invasive species come into the United States, assessing the damage that they cause, and in containing their numbers and preventing their spread.
• Identify possible terrorist threats to our food or water supply, develop methods for eliminating those threats, and communicate relevant information to the general public.
• Help develop ways to maximize the use of land for both agricultural production and for wildlife habitat and for other resource purposes.
• Provide research to show farmers and ranchers how they can better enhance wildlife and other resources on their lands through agricultural production.
• Identify emerging issues and develop tools necessary to proactively address those issues before they become problems.
• Manage the data that USGS collects in such a way as to protect the privacy and confidentiality of its providers.

American Geological Institute

• Continue collaboration in the areas of education, public outreach, and data preservation.
• Continue to exercise leadership in natural hazards research and risk communication.
• Continue important core activities of the USGS, such as natural hazard reduction, resource assessment, and environmental monitoring that serve the entire Nation and often are most applicable to those non-Federal lands where the Nation's citizens actually reside.
• Provide leadership in full accounting of both domestic and international resources: water resources, energy resources, and mineral resources.
• Reverse the trend of erosion in mineral-resource assessment capabilities to provide the analytical needs the present crisis demands.
• Provide science directed at characterizing and mitigating the risks from more people moving to hazard-prone areas: coasts, flood plains, and areas of increased seismic, volcanic, and landslide risk
• Capitalize on unique capabilities in remote sensing and geospatial data analysis in the re-assessment of domestic security needs
• Provide more integrated science in support of ecosystem management and land management decision- making
• Increase efforts to inform land managers about what data are available and how the data can contribute to well-informed decision-making
• Continue to support geologic mapping, long-term monitoring programs, and related activities that can serve as the basis for decision-making about a wide range of societal changes
• Demonstrate linkages between the earth sciences, ecology, and human health through the interdisciplinary work on the environmental exposure path
• Emphasize the impact that natural disasters have on human health
• Continue modernizing the national streamgaging and seismic networks in support of long-term monitoring.

• Create an environment in which the best scientists can work on challenging problems that address societal needs.

• Build partnerships with the academic and private sectors through creative use of fellowships, details of personnel to these organizations, and other arrangements.
• Complement the Mendenhall Program with other longer term opportunities.
• Give priority to expanding web-based data access.
• Make data available; it is one thing to preserve data and another to be able to access that data.
• Enhance collaboration with the 37 AGI member societies.

American Water Resources Association

• Support future National Water Quality Assessment (NAWQA) efforts and maintain the streamgaging network even at the expense of other activities.
• Protect and enhance USGS Federal-State cooperative program as fundamental to the organization.
• Provide information in a timely and secure fashion.
• Explore an alliance with Canada and Mexico fashioned on the "Euro-Geo Survey Organization" to coordinate data collection, dissemination and research.
• Take a leadership role in development of a National Water Policy, both in terms of historical trends and current status as well as more future-oriented in terms of prediction and projection under various policies.
• Ensure that hydrologic and biologic issues are in tandem in all future data collection, analysis, and interpretive projects.
• Consider taking a more global or continental approach and forge stronger international alliances.
• Focus attention on the vulnerability, remediation, and protection of water resources.
• Examine as new areas: extra-solar water and additional tsunami research via remote sensing.
• Expand USGS/AWRA partnership to include co-sponsoring conferences and meetings.
• Improve publishing to find ways to reach the general public and to improve user-friendliness; continue to use your excellent web site and to put information on the World Wide Web.

American Water Works Association

• Retain and emphasize USGS core mission in geology and water resources.
• Provide water data of different resolutions, in national as well as more regional or watershed-based scale.
• Use a nested data design to support a variety of information needs.
• Deliver data that are timely, available, pertinent, and useful.
• Foster partnerships at local and community level.
• Become engaged with the National Drought Policy Commission's on-going forum.
• Prepare to add value to the Homeland Security Office as they identify data elements needed for short-term and longer term planning.
• Plan to add value to issues of water-supply security by providing basic information on time of travel, geologic conditions, and understanding facilities like dams.

Applied Technology Council

• Continue to develop and augment the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS), which when fully activated will be able to provide emergency response personnel with real-time earthquake information, engineers with information about building and site response, and scientists with high-quality data to understand earthquake processes and solid earth structure and dynamics.
• Continue developing and publishing seismic hazards maps for critical engineering decisionmaking, without which engineers would not be able to design, evaluate, and rehabilitate buildings, bridges, and other structures for seismic safety.
• Continue involvement of USGS scientists with the practicing engineering community on a par with involvement in research.
• Continue involvement in national and international workshops, seminars, and engineering standards development, including defining ground motion for structural design and estimating how ground shaking is amplified under different soil conditions and levels of shaking.
• Enhance the availability and distribution of reports, data, and information from USGS researchers and outside partners.
• Work collaboratively to improve characterization of strong ground shaking for design.
• Expand USGS involvement and visibility in the development of urban earthquake hazard maps.
• Provide baseline information for advances in creating earthquake hazard resistant infrastructure.

• Support a more rigorous and disciplined post-earthquake data collection program in order to mitigate future risk.
• Support and provide critical information on which basic coastal engineering tools can be developed (storm damage assessments, shoreline change statistics, effects of sea- level rise).
• Consider a USGS role in wind hazard mitigation that would promote a national effort similar to that of the National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP).

Association of American State Geologists

• Investigate domestic energy and mineral resources with relevant Federal agencies, including the Departments of Energy and Interior, assessments of which are essential for policy decisions and national security; conduct cooperatively and contract to State geological surveys for maximum cost effectiveness.
• Continue to make streamgaging a national priority; encourage other Federal users to support streamgaging networks; champion Federal funding of the entire cost of a baseline national network of streamflow gages; support additional gages for site-specific issues through the USGS Cooperative Water Resources Program.
• Continue creation of knowledge through basic research in such areas as toxic hydrology and ground-water flow and surface-water quality modeling.
• Balance contrasting goals of basic research and application through application of financial and human resources to internal projects and studies; data management; partnerships and cooperative ventures with other Federal agencies, State and local agencies, and academic institutions.
• Support efforts in the following areas: geologic mapping, energy and mineral resources, hazard mitigation, water resources, research and education, and The National Map.

• Provide accurate, up-to-date topographic maps that are essential databases for effective homeland security.
• Overhaul the current topographic mapping and map revision process and provide opportunities for continuing input into the planning and implementation process.
• Continue to make printed topographic maps available and ensure that National Map data remain in the public domain and available to the public at low cost.

• Maintain, develop, and make publicly available national databases of earth-science information (i.e. topographic map data, geologic map data, surface- and ground-water quality data, streamflow data).

• Develop databases needed for natural hazards mitigation; provide geologic maps as the basis for natural hazard maps that are needed to effectively reduce risks to people and property.
• Support NEHRP, including the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS), research on the geology of the U.S., and legislative language that stresses the usefulness of geologic information in hazard mitigation.
• Increase application of earth-science knowledge to address the practical needs of the States' citizens.
• Develop water-use information for ground water in the State of Maryland through the cooperative program with USGS.
• Put in place some truly integrated science studies that cut across the sciences that we are dealing with (not interdisciplinary studies where you have a number of people doing different studies in the same area who have a coordinator who puts it together at the end).

Clean Water Network

• Expand National Water Quality Assessment (NAWQA) program role in data collection, monitoring, and detailed studies for pesticide contamination (expand the list of pesticide analytes, monitor for fungicides, determine source of pesticide contamination).
• Expand data collection and analysis for the Ogallala Aquifer; in particular, contaminant levels in deeper ground water and effects of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
• Provide water-quality data in searchable format.
• Provide data on the environmental impacts of discharges from vessels.
• Provide more data on the impact of nonpoint source activities on water quality (farming, logging, road building).
• Provide data on impacts to water quality from agriculture.
• Provide data to all Federal and State agencies on water quality with highest priority placed on most problematic areas.

Defenders of Wildlife

• Continue to provide coordinated monitoring including establishing techniques, providing analyses and integrating information at larger scales than other agencies are able to do.
• Continue to provide basic research and monitoring for national wildlife refuge management such as species, population or habitat specific.
• Continue to advance information delivery to agencies including the NBII work
• Continue to work on application of information for land management.
• Continue and enhance the GAP Program: complete the states; initiate similar GAP efforts for aquatic species; update and regionalize the information; improve delivery of GAP information to users for Statewide biodiversity conservation planning.
• Continue to engage in bird and amphibian monitoring.
• Support the partnership between ABI (now Nature Serve) and USGS.

Earthsat

• Move forward quickly to enable customers to receive data online.
• Continue to foster partnerships between government and the private sector with government providing the base layer of data and private sector tailoring that for various customers.
• Support the global land cover Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer data (AVHRR).
• Support efforts to lower prices for Landsat data.
• Examine data policies to comply with the OMB circulars related to COFR.
• Invest in leveraging technology to serve and deliver data.

The Groundwater Foundation

• Make communication with the Federal executive and legislative branches of government a priority in order to broaden understanding of the critical need for water data, stable funding for data collection, and a sustained policy of delivering science in the public interest.
• Continue efforts to make information more user friendly and useful and continue to provide detailed quality information on USGS website.
• Increase research, data collection, and comprehensive monitoring on ground/surface water relationships at a basin-wide scale for developing basin-wide management plans.
• Ensure that the interconnections between water quantity and water quality are understood - water that is polluted may not be available for human use.
• Provide high-quality, unbiased data and research on nonpoint source pollution.
• Provide solid data and research for policy makers and, specifically, for global climate change and its impact on water resources.
• Continue to reach out to all levels of government, nongovernment organizations, educators, businesses and communities.
• Develop new partnerships with public health entities to work on mutual interests in safe drinking water.
• Foster continuation of work on water issues under comprehensive scientific umbrella of USGS to avoid fragmentation, diluted data, and any perception of political or other agendas.
• Champion collection and analysis of data over time to avoid sporadic data collection and allow for critical trend data to be available - a 100-year period of data collection is supported.

Incorporated Research Institutes of Seismology

• Maintain the USGS core function of long-term observation and monitoring to report and forecast critical phenomena (earthquake, flood recurrence, climate change, storm frequency).
• Prioritize USGS partnership with NSF to operate and maintain the global seismographic network (GSN).
• Prioritize support for the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS); seek requested funding or restructure ANSS.
• Upgrade the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC).
• Develop a historical database catalog of earthquakes that allows projection into the future for risk assessment and probability.
• Support the NSF/USGS earthquake museum displays by seeking designated funding.
• Collaborate with NSF on Earthscope.

Information International Associates, Inc.

• Continue to provide information and science valued in public policy and decisionmaking at all levels of government.
• Continue to nurture development of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) in addressing emerging issues, such as natural resource management on public and private lands subject to recreation, invasive species, pollution and deterioration of ecosystem function, and loss of biodiversity.
• Leverage the NBII model of coordinating globally and acting locally.
• Continue to forge private and public sector partnerships.
• Continue work with other DOI agencies, especially the National Park Service, in developing information systems to add the biological layer to systems with earth and atmospheric sciences for integrated studies.
• Focus on information management, advances in e-government, science-based decisionmaking, and empowering States.
• Focus attention of data-quality guidelines issued by OMB and the impact on science products, publications, and delivery through something like NBII.

National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges

• Continue to explore areas of common research interest.
• Build on the solid foundation of cooperation between the USGS and universities to increase understanding of research needs and to multiply the impact of research, as well as engaging graduate students as future policymakers and employees.
• Ensure continuous scientific capacity building, renewal, and regeneration.
• Constitute a Scientific Advisory Board.
• Consider a peer reviewed competitive grants program that cuts across USGS disciplines; enables USGS to build and maintain a base of scientific expertise to address existing and emerging environmental, geohazard, and natural resource problems; and preserves the credibility of USGS research and science activities.

National Biological Information Infrastructure Coalition

• Leverage the NBII as a role model for all of government in e-government.
• Leverage learning from NBII with regard to partnership, technical, political, and productivity points of view.
• Leverage NBII work on emerging issues in land management at Big Bend, in urban biodiversity, in non-point-sources MPDES standards for cities over 100,000.
• Take a leadership role in using USGS data for real-time and near-time emergency management.
• Focus on information management so that data are useful, integrated, use the same projections, and are communicated online.
• Make interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies work.
• Stay on the cutting edge of technologies.
• Play a role in training at universities to have a workforce ready to use new technologies.
• Focus attention on invasive species, which are costing $150 billion a year in damage.

National Council for Science and the Environment

• Enhance partnerships - both internal DOI and external - to mitigate tension between mission support to the Department and USGS role as a national natural science agency.
• Focus on assessment analysis information and communication, using information from USGS and others, packaging it and communicating it in ways that are useful.
• Create a science advisory council to identify and set science priorities, identify opportunities for partnership between DOI and other entities, and provide external guidance and review; create complementary regional science advisory councils to solicit advice from stakeholders on a regional scale.
• Create a capacity to support scientific assessment on natural resource use and conservation topics of national and regional significance, such as the quality and quantity of the Nation's ground-water resources.
• Establish an extramural grants program for multidisciplinary research on crosscutting topics related to natural resource evaluation, use, and conservation; provide funding for extramural research where USGS expertise is lacking.
• Continue efforts to organize and distribute spatial data and information, with particular attention to combining and integrating biological data with geophysical and hydrological data in a consistent format; increase effort to translating technical information and making it available to non-technical users; support the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII).
• Provide education through research institutes such as water resource and cooperative research institutes.
• Connect scientific information with decision-making in a much more integrated approach.

National Ground Water Association

• Proactively engage USGS partners in proactively identifying societal issues that fall within their mission responsibilities.
• Proactively identify what other expertise will be needed to resolve those societal issues and then proactively seek the expertise through partnerships with other Federal agencies, State agencies, universities, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector.
• Proactively seek partnerships.
• Address societal water issues such as: ground-water availability and safe yield, ground-water augmentation, and water security.
• Provide information and decision support tools for water management to the user community.
• Be the champion in bringing traditionally separated scientific endeavors to bear on complex global environmental issues.
• Participate with other agencies in creating a computer-based interoperable system - a modular way of bringing the pertinent models and data to bear on the issue at hand.
• Work collaboratively to address water security issues from natural or man-made disasters by prioritizing population areas, assessing infrastructure needs and examining surface- and ground-water supplies.

National Institutes for Water Resources

• Continue to build upon the excellence of science within USGS.
• Embrace new information technologies to improve applicability of science for decisionmaking.
• Formalize partnerships nationally, regionally and locally, especially around use of information technologies, to deliver integrated, interoperable packages of data and information to local units of government for land-use decisions.
• Leverage technologies to provide decision-support tools and implication/risk assessment models for land use, wildlife and habitat protection and development.
• Develop an integrated, user-driven information system capable of allowing users to integrate data, insert additional layers of information specific to their needs, and flexibility to address local questions and problems.
• Provide modeling and analysis tools and decision-support capability that provide users with information on near- and long-term impacts of parallel alternative decisions and risks posed to the environment, natural resources, ecosystems, and human health.

National Mining Association

• Continue to provide unbiased and reliable mineral commodity and country-specific mineral information for monitoring the U.S. mineral situation.
• Maintain current programs and services providing mineral information.
• Provide critical information to support the development and implementation of a global mineral-related strategy for the U.S., which would be severely compromised without this information.
• Meet national security needs by tracking the world "hot spots" with respect to strategic and critical minerals and materials.
• Provide essential information necessary for developing a national mineral policy in the interest of national security and that includes a comprehensive and essential understanding of the worldwide commodity markets necessary for strategic and critical materials.

NatureServe (formerly Association for Biodiversity Information)

• Provide a standardized land cover/vegetation map for resource management, conservation planning and assessment initiatives.
• Collaboratively develop consistent standards that address Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) standards and lead to one set of products.
• Provide leadership to integrate key sets of data that can be put together in complex fashions to make planning and assessment decisions
• Provide leadership to identify management solutions and to develop early warning systems.
• Provide a surficial geology data layer for the Nation to assist in predictive range mapping.

The Ornithological Council/American Institute of Biological Sciences

• Continue support for the GAP Program, both terrestrial and aquatic.
• Continue to develop focused research initiatives that build on national conservation and management programs, such as the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI) as a framework for a scientifically based, landscape-wide systems of conservation efforts at all scales.
• Continue to provide fundamental research and monitoring, the foundation of good resource management, whether or not there is a NABCI; continue to support NABCI-related research until appropriations for it are obtained.
• Continue to support NBII, but emphasize transmitting information and helping the users use the information.
• Provide leadership for a coordinated effort to monitor using the same methodology across the landscape, using a meta approach (standard data recording and analytical methods, overall monitoring plan, monitoring protocols).
• Expand partnerships to include grants and contracts as well as increased participation of academic communities and resource management agencies to build greater organization of the scientific enterprise.
• Include the academic community in the process of establishing research priorities as well as in doing the research.
• Fully participate in the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units as a template for the appropriate USGS niche within the larger research matrix.
• Look at an external funding program; establish more cooperative funding mechanisms and grant programs.
• Consider creation of a technical assistance corps (as has been championed by the National Park Service) consisting of non-research grade scientists to provide consultation, liaison between researcher and land manager and increased application of science to land management decisionmaking.
• Focus attention on the issue of data-quality guidelines from the Office of Management and Budget and involve outside support community.
• Create a scientific advisory board to foster continual dialog.

Rachel Carson Council

• Maintain special and valuable nature of USGS science as being created outside of involvement with regulations and those being regulated.
• Champion advantage of USGS science in being able to apply uniform scientific methods for a number of sites across the country so that results from different geographic regions can be compared.
• Continue and expand monitoring of national water needs.
• Expand monitoring and data collection on ground- and surface-water contamination from pesticides and provide an estimate of the cost of such monitoring.
• Provide information on the bioaccumulation of pesticides in plants; the movement of pesticides in air and how weather conditions affect pesticide applications.

Wildlife Management Institute

• Continue involvement in the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI), an example of multi-scale, multidisciplinary, integrated projects that address priorities on a national scale.

• Continue to emphasize the national, important priorities whether or not they are actually funded.
• Support USGS cooperative wildlife research units and science centers that contribute essential research for wildlife management.
• Focus on crosscutting and unifying initiatives coordinating many people, disciplines, and agencies.
• Bring research down to more practical, applicable, pragmatic levels useful for land management problem solving at individual land-management units.

The Wildlife Society

• Continue to synthesize a diversity of information about critical resource issues and communicate it to policymakers, decisionmakers, and the public.
• Enhance the ability to respond to research needs of Federal and State land management agencies through increased interagency communication, budget flexibility, and an effective strategy for prioritizing and responding to customer needs.
• Continue full funding for the Cooperative Wildlife Research Units Program, as the archetype of the working partnership sought by the USGS.
• Fund USGS biological science centers and their research, monitoring, and outreach activities; provide sufficient resources to recruit and maintain diverse and experienced staffs.
• Initiate an aggressive gender and ethnic diversity strategy.
• Increase capability to address declining wildlife populations; loss of biological diversity, the listing of threatened and endangered species, and the myriad causes of species decline.
• Increase capability to investigate causes of, and solutions to, problems associated with over abundant wildlife populations.
• Investigate how to manage diseases that may be transmitted between wildlife and domesticated animals.
• Expand efforts to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of private lands conservation programs.
• Identify appropriate performance measures that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of Federal land management activities in conserving wildlife.

U.S. Department of the Interior - Bureau of Land Management

• Focus on information transfer, packaging it so that science results are useable to managers and other specialists.
• Emphasize applied science relevant to decisionmaking.
• Recognize and respond to the time sensitivity of decisionmakers - information is needed in a quick timeframe; managers cannot wait five years.
• Maintain sufficient flexibility to be able to implement short-term, tactical science projects and respond to urgent, priority management questions.
• Explore a National Resource Preservation Program-type program (similar to that of the National Park Service) with BLM.
• Anticipate future management actions so that both fundamental and applied science needs can be addressed.
• Focus for the future on land management issues to drive scientific investigations, i.e. land practices compatible with protection and recovery of candidate threatened and endangered species; loss of land productivity and habitat due to invasive species; rapid detection, eradication, and prevention of invasive species; and develop techniques for rapid reclamation.
• Provide information and help in understanding water quality, quantity and allocation to meet changing demographics and values of the West.
• Help develop new land and resource management methods in response to changing population patterns.
• Focus on USGS core missions in support of land and resource management, rather than focusing on partnerships related to human health and space.
• Manage information and data and make them useable to customers as highest priority.
• Continue to maintain levels of acquisition and availability of Landsat data and information.
• Strengthen partnership activities to determine use of Landsat satellite data for real-time management decisions.
• Continue fundamental research only in those areas where USGS is a national or worldwide leader in the discipline; other fundamental research should be left largely to the academic community.
• Continue international efforts where USGS is the worldwide leader (i.e. volcanology, seismology, etc.)

U.S. Department of the Interior - National Park Service

• Continue support for streamgaging stations in National Parks, which provide consistent, long-term data essential to monitoring changes to streamflow in parks and securing and protecting NPS water rights.
• Continue providing research, long-term monitoring, geologic mapping, and biological support leading to critical information for park management and improved public education.
• Capitalize on the water quality partnership model for proposal development and project funding decisions; NAWQA and other USGS cooperative water-quality monitoring programs are integral to the protection and management of water quality in units of the National Park System.
• Provide science that can be applied to specific problems at the local, park level.
• Collaborate to ensure scale, scope and timing of research meets NPS science needs.
• Continue to explore new joint initiatives with USGS and NPS, especially those designed with locally focused components.
• Clarify roles of regions and national programs and provide contact/access points in the USGS reorganization.
• Increase personal liaisons between USGS scientists and park management and between scientists from both agencies at the regional level; look for opportunities for co-location of personnel.
• Broaden and deepen research in parks as components of regional and national projects.
• Continue finding ways for partnership funding, especially for small, park-specific projects.
• Strengthen links between USGS scientists and NPS interpreters and educators.
• Increase opportunities to interact on an interdisciplinary basis at sub-regional meetings of USGS and NPS.
• Explore collaborative efforts to look at integrating information and data from Landsat and other remote sensing systems for land and resource management decisionmaking.

U.S. Department of Agriculture - Natural Resources Conservation Service

• Re-establish streamgages where abandoned and establish more in targeted drainage areas.
• Continue to work with all data collection agencies to coordinate, develop and modify data-quality standards.
• Continue leadership and coordination in the development of geospatial data among Federal, State, local, and private shareholders; trade and develop new data sets to provide synergy with other agencies.
• Improve access, interpretation, usability of scientific data for decisionmaking in a broad context; continue to produce high quality maps and bulletins and provide products in hard copy and digital versions.
• Coordinate with a multitude of Federal and non-Federal partners to avoid overlap and duplication of effort; work cooperatively with other agencies to champion budget needs.
• Expand data collection for global climate change, broad ecosystem change, river basins, and water quality and flow conditions in drainage areas.
• Expedite development of core geospatial data themes (framework) through budgetary support, internalizing the effort into USGS and/or acquiring data from the private sector.
• Provide access to technical assistance to find, get and use USGS data and information.
• Improve ways to collect data and assess ecological conditions.
• Expand interaction with other agencies in applied research via remote sensing (acoustical, laser, chemical, thermal, biological).
• Focus attention on emerging issues, such as global climate change, status and trends in water quality, river basin and watershed issues, and status and trends of the health of water resources and ecosystems.
• Promote and support sharing and exchange of staff.
• Establish a pool of multi-disciplinary technical assistants who can help health experts analyze, integrate, and extract information from geospatial data.
• Develop data sharing models that form the basis for long-term data exchange, development, and access by multiple users.
• Continue to improve access to data, provide user-friendly interpretation of data and simple web access to data.
• Maintain and serve real-time data over the Internet; provide for data that are "time stamped;" and provide ability to re-project data prior to download as well as download data greater than 10MB.
• Generate and maintain seamless national products; migrate spatial data repositories to seamless national coverages.

U.S. Department of Commerce - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Marine Fisheries Service

• Provide seabed habitat characterization and mapping and visualization of these data (3-D and for GIS).
• Provide understanding and quantification of natural versus anthropogenic effects on seabed habitats, including characterization of change over time.
• Provide help in understanding linkages between seabed geology and geologic processes, and the distribution of living marine resources associated with the seabed.
• Provide for prediction and identification of areas of the seabed vulnerable to anthropogenic effects.
• Help to identify areas and characteristics of seabed that should be protected.
• Develop understanding to ensure that ecosystem function and services are maintained to have sustainable resources.
• Formalize and actively seek support from OMB and Congress for a joint funding initiative with USGS and NOAA for substrate studies and research related to benthic habitats.

U.S. Department of Commerce - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service

• Strengthen the national streamgaging network; continue to provide measurements of height and flow for rivers and streams in support of NWS mission to provide river and flood forecasts at over 4,000 locations on major rivers and small streams.
• Provide USGS data and cooperation with water-related research in support of NWS new science effort of the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Services (AHPS) program, which includes providing near-term river height and flow forecasts, probabilistic forecasts, graphical forecasts from days to months into the future, and flood inundation maps that provide a graphical display of forecasted flood areas.

• Continue and expand partnership to include other USGS science disciplines, especially geography; explore partnership opportunities with NWS for displaying information in a GIS-type environment (i.e. digital elevation model data).

• Continue joint international projects with NWS similar to the technology transfer in support of reconstruction in Central America following Hurricane Mitch.
• Better define partnership between USGS and NWS to increase support of river forecast system research, development, and technology transfer activities and to reduce potential conflicts.

• Collaboratively improve flood inundation mapping technologies and uses.
• Collaborate to better use hydraulic and hydrologic modelers for research, development, and technology transfer.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

• Continue to maintain databases that contribute vitally to knowledge and research on human health, particularly pesticide usage, ground-water contamination, and fate and transport of chemicals in water, air and soil.
• Intensify research in exposure and risk assessment to define chemicals in the environment, determine what chemicals need to be assessed for human health effects, and what combinations of chemicals people might be exposed to (important for Parkinson's research).
• Continue collaboration in the design of studies to address potential human health effects from exposures to toxins from certain algae and bacteria.
• Continue collaboration and use of USGS databases to explore distribution, migration, and ultimate consequences of common toxics (arsenic, lead, and PCBs) in support of grantees funded under the Superfund Basic Research Program.
• Jointly explore the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for environmental health mapping for use in exposure profiles, risk assessments, disease incidence, and epidemiology (i.e. Parkinson's Disease, breast cancer); ensure the quality of data going into GIS.
• Expand collaboration with USGS expertise in biology, microbiology, wildlife health, ecology, geology, hydrology, geography, remote sensing, and GIS; for example, on U.S./Mexico border environmental health issues, where USGS can provide data that are consistent over large space and time scales.
• Explore the possibilities of liaison arrangements between NIH/NIEHS and USGS.

U.S. Department of State - Office of Energy, Sanctions and Commodities Policy

• Continue critical, close collaboration between USGS and the State Department to improve technical capacity in foreign countries.

• Maintain close ties between State Department officials and USGS international minerals and commodities experts, which has crucial ties to national security interests and market implications for trade.
• Continue to provide analyses and other products used to better understand and interpret developments in respective countries and to serve U.S. commercial and economic interests abroad.

• Continue to share data and analysis and foster goodwill in this exchange, which improves the investment climate and helps to stabilize markets.
• Continue to provide support for State Department training for Foreign Service Economic Officers, an important element of which is the opportunity for them to advocate on behalf of U.S. investors in natural-resources-related activities abroad.
• Continue other technical assistance in such areas as earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides, which saves lives and property and benefits the overall environment.
• Continue uniform access to all available information for smooth functioning of commodities markets and U.S. national security and prosperity.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

• Provide regular (5 years) assessments of global land cover using Landsat satellite imagery and relevant datasets

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - Office of Pesticide Programs

• Provide monitoring data to enhance modeling for estimating pesticide exposures through water.
• Continue partnership and institutional relationship efforts through assigned technical staff on site.
• Continue to provide monitoring and modeling capabilities as we struggle to make hundreds of pesticide regulatory decisions.

• Continue support in the development of the Watershed Regression for Pesticides (WARP) Model using monitoring data to develop more sophisticated and more predictive models, to enable the capability to extrapolate what has been learned in watersheds where extensive work has been done to those where little or no work has been done.
• Work cooperatively with EPA/OPP and Department of Agriculture and industry on 5-year plan regarding pesticide exposures from water, food, and residential uses.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - Office of Science and Technology

• Work collaboratively to better determine when we have clean water and when an aquatic system is healthy.
• Work collaboratively at the Federal, State and local levels to determine how and at what geographic scale water resources should be measured and monitored.
• Work collaboratively to present an integrated picture of water quality at the national level (national trends, integrated assessment work, relating fresh water information to coastal and marine systems).
• Provide leadership to better integrate social, political and economic needs into assessment work and to monitoring for ecological indicators and geo-spatial information.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds

• Continue to support the USGS/EPA-Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds partnership with valuable, on-site liaison officers.
• Continue partnership efforts on the national hydrology data set and the National Water Quality Monitoring Council.
• Collaborate to complete the work underway on hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Continue to support the national watershed forum and recommendations to develop cleanwater.gov and the Watershed Information Network.
• Partner with EPA and support volunteer monitors.
• Consistently support States, interstate organizations and multi-state watershed groups in the formation of watershed councils.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency - Region 7

• Establish an EPA/USGS monitoring partnership at the national level.
• Create a joint set of national monitoring objectives between EPA and USGS that enables flexible partnering at regional and State levels and would provide characterization of the condition of all waters, list impaired waters, and protect biological integrity.
• Integrate water-quality monitoring activities through establishment of a coordination partnership that links organizations at national, regional, and State levels.
• Use the watershed as the most relevant spatial scale for joint objectives.

Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (and as a member of the Interstate Council on Water Policy)

• Provide good, sound science to address the water availability questions throughout the country.
• Address as part of water availability, climate variability.
• Work collaboratively to assess the stream gauge network and keep the network developing.
• Address water resource issues through interdisciplinary processes that integrate projects with various Federal (EPA, Corps of Engineers) and other agencies and with regions.
• Continue your support for water-supply programs throughout the country.
• Address water security issues by beginning to explore opportunities to analyze baseline data and to gather information on time of travel and dilution.