Research

Each year, CAST staff are involved in numerous major research projects, training programs, and other cooperative efforts with a variety of governmental and business organizations. These projects include GIS applications, data development, technology transfer, software evaluation, remote sensing applications, and similar efforts. Cooperative research or teaching efforts are also in place with off-campus faculty at the University of Arkansas, Monticello, the Arkansas Archeological Survey, Arkansas State University, and Arkansas Tech University. The total amount of grant monies awarded during FY 99-00 was $998,501.00. A list of grants awarded during FY 99-00 is listed first, followed by a detailed list of all projects that were active during FY 99-00. (Some projects listed in the second section are multi-year projects and projects that were listed as awarded during FY98-99 but remained active during the year.)

12/01/98 – 11/30/00, Second-year funding.

Awarded 03/21/00, Arkansas Department of Information Services. $312,000.00

• The Seamless Warehouse of Arkansas Geodata (SWAG).
• $610,985.00 (December 1998 – November 2000).

CAST has initiated a collaborative research and technology transfer project with a focus on delivering stable framework and corporate geodata into a diverse user community using existing Internet tools. This effort is based on CAST’s existing statewide, comprehensive spatial database and emerging commercial software products. Under this initiative, CAST is working with a network of partners to build a comprehensive, open standards-compliant warehouse that supports vector and raster data, attribute information, and descriptive metadata. The SWAG project demonstrates the use of an enterprise approach to managing and providing digital geodata. SWAG provides a bridge that spans distributed data, applications, and user domains, thereby empowering all levels of government with geospatial data and infrastructure. Additionally, it represents a working instance of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure that can be replicated across governmental components. In 1999, due in large part to the efforts of CAST's Technical Director Jim Farley, CAST's SWAG project received the Computerworld Smithsonian Award. The SWAG project will become part of the Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

In conjunction with the USGS office in Little Rock and the Arkansas Department of Health, CAST is participating in a Source Water Protection Project, under a national mandate by the Environmental Protection Agency. CAST will provide 1,565+ maps of all of Arkansas’ public water intakes and the potential sources of contamination adjacent to each source. Various GIS data and map products will be developed during this multi-year project. The goal of this model is to define and rank the relative risk of contamination of each of the Arkansas public water sources.

In the Summer of 1999, CAST began work on the 1999 Arkansas Land-Use/Land-Cover (LULC) project. Funded by the Arkansas Soil and Water Conservation Commission, the overall goal of the 1999 Arkansas LULC project is to map seasonal land-use and land-cover for the entire state of Arkansas for the year 1999. The maps will be derived from Landsat TM data and depict how the landscape of the state changes from season to season: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. The multi-temporal approach to LULC mapping, utilized by this research, will extend the ability to map certain temporal information about agricultural cropping patterns, pasture land type, forest land types, and seasonal flooding patterns. The resulting data set will also be useful for measuring landscape conversion that has taken place in the past and monitoring future landscape changes. Project work for the past fiscal year involved the acquisition of ground-truth data, the selection and purchase of remote sensing data, image preprocessing, and image classification/ information extraction. Results of this research will be published via CAST’s website.

Spring 1999: Image water is black to blue, forested areas are light green, winter wheat fields are grayish-green, crop residue and bare soils are white, gray, and cyan.

Summer 1999: The winter wheat crop has been harvested, soybeans are light green, rice is slate blue, crop residue and bare soils are white to tan.

This project is composed of three phases to design a web-based atlas of soils available to any Internet users for browsing. The data made available will be exactly the same as those contained in the Soil Survey books that were historically published by NRCS. This first version will allow the user to select a quarter-quad from an index sheet. The returned quarter-quads include a grayscale orthophoto and labeled soil type boundaries. Descriptions for the latter are accessible by clicking in a specific area. A prototype serving a subset of the Soil Survey maps for Woodruff County is currently accessible from CAST’s website. NRCS headquarters is interested in using our method to publish Soil Surveys for all counties in the U.S.

• Geo-Spatial Support and Training for the EAST Initiative.
• $69,877.00 (October 1999 – June 2000).
• $139,853.00 (July 2000 – June 2001). Awarded May 9, 2000.

The EAST Project is an outgrowth of a highly successful model that was developed by Tim Stephenson of Greenbrier High School. From the beginning, the EAST project has stressed learning in combination with community service. Students use high tech tools to solve real problems in their own hometowns. High school students in the EAST program have developed emergency response systems for town fire departments, created new economical and efficient bus routes, and designed new parking lots for their schools. Each summer, teachers from Arkansas and surrounding states' high schools attend two-week professional development workshops that includes GIS/GPS components. This program is being rapidly expanded to include as many communities as possible (56 schools during the 1999-2000 school year; at least 92 during the 2000-2001 school year). Due to this phenomenal growth, new EAST training facilities have been established in Harrison and Little Rock, Arkansas. CAST staff members Malcolm Williamson and Heath Wallis provide technical support and training, including on-site visits and web-delivered training materials, for this highly successful program.

This year, CAST staff participated in the first EAST Partnership Conference. This conference, held in Little Rock in late March, brought together

students, educators, local and state leaders, and private industry executives. Additionally, CAST is hosting a two-week Introduction to Technology camp for first-year EAST students and teachers from five Arkansas delta schools.

• Web-GIS to Evaluate Environmental Impact of Population Expansion.
• $22,957.00 (September 1999 – September 2000).

In cooperation with the RGIS Wisconsin Program, the Center is involved in a research project focusing on the integration of a suite of EPA environmental data sets and other data sources dealing with demographic growth. The goal of the project is to develop easily accessible systems, using the World Wide Web, that will allow citizens to consider the interaction of projected population growth in an area and its possible impact or interaction on environmental processes.

Project MAIN is a cooperative effort between CAST, the schools of the EAST initiative, and the Arkansas Department of Information Services (DIS). The goal of this project is to optimize networking of the public sector in the state. Identification of routing of existing fiber-optic runs is fairly straightforward, involving acquisition of data from the network vendors. The difficult task has been accurately identifying the location of all potential public network consumers (PNCs), including such offices as local police and fire departments, libraries, county, state, and local government offices, etc. The known quantity of these entities in the state numbers around 4000. There are currently 53 EAST locations spread across Arkansas, and that possess both the technical expertise to manipulate a geographic database and the local access to verify the locations of these PNCs. Tim Stephenson, Director of the EAST Program, was contacted and agreed that this was an important project for the state and the local communities, and that it would be a great example of the potential of EAST. Governor Huckabee announced his support for the project by issuing an official proclamation of support. CAST became involved as a provider of technological support, dividing up data for the schools, supporting the students in their data validation efforts, and then collecting and merging the completed data.

• GIS-Based Natural Resources Analyses for the St. Francis River.
• $23,845.00 (March 2000 – June 2001).

CAST is working with the Arkansas Soil and Water Conservation Commission (ASWCC) to identify, quantify, and analyze wetland resources within the St. Francis River wetland planning region. Much of the project encompasses the gathering and translation of data to be compatible with the geographic information systems (GIS) used by the ASWCC. Analyses of the same data will focus on the methodology co-developed by CAST and the Multi-Agency Wetland Planning Team (MAWPT), as already applied to four other wetland planning regions in the Arkansas delta. Compatibility with previous analyses will be of primary consideration, in order to maintain the value of existing research. Cooperating researchers at CAST and ASWCC will also examine

methods to enhance and improve this existing methodology.

• Census 2000 (Technical Support of Arkansas' 2000 Redistricting).

CAST has recently entered into a cooperative agreement with the Arkansas Secretary of

State, and one of the first amendments to this agreement comes in the form of GIS technical support for the 2001 Statewide Redistricting effort. The primary goal of this agreement is for CAST to assist the members of the Arkansas Legislative Redistricting Project regarding technical issues related to the hardware, software tools, and data required for completion of the Year 2001

Redistricting effort. This effort will include the assessment of the software and hardware capabilities required to effectively complete the redistricting of Arkansas' House and Senate districts once the U.S. Census Bureau has released the Year 2000 population data. After the Secretary of State's Office has purchased software and hardware, CAST will ensure the product(s) are functional and will load the Census data that will be required to complete the redistricting project. CAST will not participate in the actual redistricting project.

• Harnessing Geo-Media Book.
• $20,000.00 (May 2000 – December 2000)

Harnessing GeoMedia, a general introduction to GIS and the GeoMedia 4.0 software, is in progress and scheduled for publication in Fall 2000. This volume is a follow up to the 1998 publication of INSIDE GeoMedia published by OnWord Press. The 1,000-page book covers the functionality of the GeoMedia and GeoMedia Professional toolkits and the spatial data management concepts behind that functionality. It is aimed at beginning through intermediate users, describing GeoMedia’s use in the context of typical spatial data management tasks and sample workflows. The workflows are how to examples based on sample data sets. They are designed to help readers develop GeoMedia skills by providing practical hands-on exercises which illustrate the procedures for accomplishing both typical GIS tasks and those unique to GeoMedia. The book's contents include GeoWorkspaces; Warehouses; Legends; Data Types, Manipulation, and Structure; Thematics and Images; Select Sets; Performing Queries with GeoMedia; Mapping and Output; Using Access; Working Onscreen; Advanced Data Development and Management, Projections and Datum Transformations, Introduction to Data Server Terminology; Creating and Configuring a Coordinate System File; GeoMedia and MGE; Setting Up a CAD Server; GeoMedia ArcInfo and ArcView Servers; Oracle and GeoMedia; and Importing Data into Access Databases.

Since its inception, CAST has assisted NPS with its mandate to provide archaeological information to its local offices and other federal agencies to meet the cultural resources management requirements set by various Acts of Congress. In order to achieve this, NPS now has three sets of data currently available to the public via the web. NADB-Reports is a database of more than 250,000 archeological reports. NADB-NAGPRA provides the full text of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, up-to-date information on regulations and guidance, and summaries of inventory and repatriation activities. NABD-NACD (Native American Consultation Database), the latest addition, is the result of a partnership between the National Park Service and the U.S. Air Force. It provides an easy way to identify contacts for each of the 771 federally recognized Indian tribes, Alaska Native groups, and Native Hawaiian organizations. Contacts can be searched by name, tribe, reservation, state, country, and military installation. This information is crucial to organizations who must comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. In November of 1997, NPS and CAST made substantial improvement to the web interface to both NADB-Reports and NADB-NAGPRA and doubled the amount of citations made available via NADB-Reports. A web interface to the NABD-NACD database is accessible by the public.

• FGDC Clearinghouse.
• $9,000.00 (October 1999 – September 2000).
• $39,825.00 (September 1998 – September 2000).

CAST was awarded these grants from the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) to create an on-line clearinghouse of digital geographic data. This project is directed towards establishing a network accessible inventory of digital geodata from Arkansas and maintaining this archive in a standards-compliant format consistent with that established by the FGDC. When complete, a permanent node in the Clearinghouse network will be established to provide an index of sorts to the geographic data that has been collected at the Center. Over time, this catalog will be expanded through additional entries.

• Delivering GIS Technology to the Desktop..
• $50,000.00 (July 1999 – September 1999).

Working with NASA, CAST staff have integrated an extensive digital geodata archive, a small footprint geoprocessing engine, a web-based user interface, and the delivery power which is inherent on the net to create a maps-on-demand server for Arkansas imagery and other geodata. The simple, easy to use interface to this mapping environment guides the user through a series of steps or decision points where data layers, map composition, and presentation options are resolved. Output products are provided to screen viewers, or these output map products can be directed to the user in a compressed format via email. Also in cooperation with NASA, CAST staff are working to improve the way in which geographic information is located, evaluated, and delivered. Using the comprehensive statewide digital data archive for Arkansas, which has been assembled at CAST, CAST staff members are assembling a prototype platform for publishing and delivering geospatial data over the web. In addition to standard web technologies, new content-rich database technology based on the hybrid object-relational model for database design is being used to create an environment where users can query, evaluate, prospect, and obtain digital data to support their applications.

RGIS-Mid-South, located at CAST, is one of eight regional centers located throughout the United States whose mission is to transfer GIS technology to county and local governments. In 1991, when RGIS-Mid-South (formally NCRI-SW) became part of CAST, it brought together the considerable expertise of a network of researchers with a long-standing history of GIS development that has been beneficial to both. The RGIS mission includes technology transfer, demonstrations to introduce GIS to county and local officials, needs assessments, assisting in pilot projects, research to develop new analytical and technological delivery systems, and development of accessible digital databases; all aimed toward aiding local and county governments in their service to the community.

On January 27, NASA Earth Science Enterprise (ESE): Scientific Data Purchase Project’s (SDP) Tasking Committee reviewed and approved a tasking request submitted by Bruce Gorham, CAST’s Remote Sensing Specialist. Under the terms of the grant, Positive Systems’ Inc. will provide ADAR 5500 airborne remote sensing data for a 319 square kilometer area over Fayetteville, Arkansas. The data, valued at $51,041, will be collected in October 2000. The objective of the associated research is a comprehensive comparison of ADAR 5500 and Landsat 7 TM data for land use/land cover mapping and change detection in a rural-urban fringe setting. Landsat 7’s spatial resolution (30 meters), while not well suited for urban applications, is a valuable data source for mapping and monitoring both forest and agricultural lands at the urban-rural fringe. Conversely, ADAR 5500 data, with its 1-meter spatial resolution, is optimal for urban applications, but introduces significant variability within fields, forests, and woodlots. Taken together these two remote sensing systems should render an accurate picture of land use and land cover at the rural-urban fringe.

In the Fall of 1999, CAST along with various agencies and entities within the state agreed to enter into a cooperative agreement with Space Imaging, Inc. and its affiliate vendor, Earthsat Corporation. The purpose of the agreement was to acquire current statewide Landsat Thematic Mapper coverage for Spring 1999. The agreement allowed the cooperators to acquire the TM data at a greatly reduced price, which would not be available otherwise. Under the terms of the agreement, all participants share equally in the overall raw data costs. Bruce Gorham, CAST’s Remote Sensing Specialist, was appointed by the cooperators to act as their point of contact with the data vendors. Mr. Gorham was responsible for working with the data vendors to identify and select appropriate satellite images based on cloud cover and overall scene quality. The satellite data was received from Earthsat Corp in March 2000. In addition to the statewide Spring coverage, CAST also acquired statewide coverage for Summer, Fall, and Winter. This additional data, purchased by CAST alone, will be used in support of various CAST projects including SWAG, and the 1999 Arkansas Land-use/Land-cover project.

United State Geological Survey (USGS) Memorandum of Understanding. In order to establish a framework for the exchange of scientific and technical knowledge, with respect to the sciences with an emphasis on geospatial applications, USGS and CAST have agreed to cooperate to pursue scientific and technical areas of the sciences and spatial applications. Other University of Arkansas related programs participating in these objectives are Anthropology, Geosciences, Environmental Dynamics, Landscape Architecture, Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences, Biological Sciences, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Middle East Studies. The framework of this memorandum includes such areas of collaborative activities as exchanges of technical information, cooperative research, and other academic and outreach activities. It may also include geospatial applications, open standards for geoprocessing, dissemination of complex data over the web, and decision support related to disaster management.

This grant was awarded to Dr. Kenneth Kvamme to collect basic data on archaeological geophysics projects conducted throughout North America and to develop a computer database and website around these data. A bibliography of about 800 citations has been amassed, and the website contains a projects database, an image library, educational materials, a bibliography database, an instrumentation database, a practitioners and consultants database, links to other geophysical websites, and an upcoming events page. The grant supported two Department of Anthropology graduate students, Richard Allan and Ryan Peterson, who put most of the databases and website together. The website is maintained at CAST. It may be viewed at: http://www.cast.uark.edu/nadag.

Black River Inundation Mapping (BRIM) Project. The BRIM research project, completed in August 1999, was conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACOE) and the Arkansas Soil and Water Conservation Commission (ASWCC). The purpose of the BRIM project was to calculate and map the probability of inundation for all areas within the Black River Basin from Corning to Black Rock, Arkansas. Inundation probability was calculated on the basis of correlating historic gage height records to corresponding historic Landsat TM imagery from 1983 to 1999. Two types of digital map products were produced. Map series 1, at a scale of 1:115,000, depicted (1) the geographic extent of the inundation for all areas within the study area for the correlated gauge heights, (2) the average number of days in every month, as well as the annual average inundation for correlated gauge heights, and (3) the probability that a given area within the study area will be inundated in a particular month, as well as annual probability. Map series 2, at a scale of 1:63,360, depict the same information as the large maps described above, but are mapped at a finer scale: (1 inch = 1 mile) and only display annual probability and days-inundated information. Each of these maps corresponds to a USGS 7.5 minute quadrangle. The project was completed and all associated data products were delivered to ASWCC and the USACOE in August 1999.

The Black River Inundation Mapping project (BRIM) produced a series of maps derived from the correlation of remote sensing satellite data with river gauge height data from 1982 to 1998. The maps depict the average number of days in every month that land within the Black River is inundated as well as the probability that a given area within the study area will be inundated in a particular month. An annual average map was also produced. The map above shows inundation information for the central portion of the Black River watershed for the month of December.

Black River Watershed near Pocahontas