USGS Multimedia Gallery: (Video)--Overview of The National Map Corps

This video will give you a basic overview of The National Map Corps and how you can get involved. The National Map Corps is an investigation into the feasibility of using volunteers to collect data for The National Map and US Topo. Soon there will be a suite of more detailed videos that will show you action items such as how to create a user account and how to navigate around the online editor.

The home base for this project is The National Map Corps website, located at the URL on the screen.

To access the website you can use Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

The US Geological Survey is a science organization that provides impartial information on the health of our ecosystems and environment, the natural hazards that threaten us, the natural resources we rely on, the impacts of climate and land-use change, and the core science systems that help us provide timely, relevant, and useable information.

Part of the USGS mission is to create and maintain base data, map products, and geospatial web services for the United States.

The National Map is a set of basic geospatial information provided as a variety of products and services. Through The National Map Viewer, anyone can interactively view National Map data as a map, customize the view, print a map, and download the data for use in geographic information systems. The Viewer provides public access to high-quality, integrated National Map data from Federal, State, local and tribal partners.

The National Map has 8 primary themes, or layers, including Structures which is the theme The National Map Corps is currently supporting.

In addition to The National Map, the USGS is also responsible for the creation of the USGS topographic map series. The new generation of these maps, known as US Topo, are a digital product created with data from The National Map.

The USGS is currently reviving a program called The National Map Corps. The National Map Corps is a volunteer program that allows citizens to get involved with creating and updating geographic data for The National Map. For more information on the history of this program, please see the USGS factsheet, Volunteer Map Data Collection at the USGS.

We are currently looking for people like you to work with us to collect different types of structures for the USGS. The data you collect during this project will be loaded into The National Map. If you have access to the Internet and are willing to dedicate some time to editing map data we hope you will consider participating.

The structures data theme consists of name, function, location, and other characteristics of selected manmade facilities. Structures data are designed to be used in general mapping and in the analysis of structure related activities using GIS technology. The structures data can be downloaded from The National Map Viewer, and certain structures are also being added to the new US Topo. For this project we are collecting the structures seen here.

This year we are only collecting data in Colorado, but we hope to expand to nationwide collection of features next year. You can help make this project successful by signing up to volunteer to collect data in Colorado.

To learn more about the volunteer process please read the user guide for contributing structures data to The National Map. The guide also describes how to get started and create your user accounts.

In addition, the user guide provides detailed instructions on how to edit existing structure points and add new structure points, as well as lists of acceptable resources and examples.

After you have read the guidelines you can create your user account for the online editor and explore the editing interface.

After reading the user guide you should be somewhat familiar with the editing interface. To edit click on the edit tab and login with your user information.

From the Edit View, you will see existing points in the interface. Red points have not been edited while green points have already been checked by a volunteer.

The icons for all of the structures we are collecting can be found on the left. To create a new point on the map, simply drag one of the icons onto the map.

Clicking on a new or existing point exposes its attributes. Name is the only required attribute, but other attributes such as address may be filled out under the optional tab.

The search bar on the left can help you look for existing points or locate a specific location.

The background dropdown contains various imagery and maps that can be used for locating and placing points.

Again, for a detailed description of the editing process please read the user guide and keep your eyes open for our upcoming video series.

We hope you will consider becoming a member of The National Map Corps and mapping your local community. If you don’t live in Colorado, you can still participate by following the information in the user guide for researching structures using the internet. Get involved in citizen science and help the USGS create The National Map.