Geospatial Information Services (GIS) - Expertise

Habitat protection and restoration

Fisheries and coral reef habitat are under increasing stress from anthropogenic sources. Habitat degradation impacts local economies and negatively affects other ecological services valuable to the nation. IMSG plans and executes research, monitoring, outreach, data collection, analysis, and policy development to restore impaired habitats. Geographic data and information are used in every stage of the restoration efforts.

Coastal and marine spatial planning

Our staff is instrumental in support of the U.S. government in the design and deployment of a new effort to reduce conflicting ocean uses. We are helping NOAA build capacity within regional ocean councils to better balance ecological and economic benefits. This led to IMSG developing the Multipurpose Marine Cadastre, a web-based national scale map application displaying administrative boundaries in the coastal and offshore environment.

Coastal hazards management

IMSG provides scientific and technical support to help local communities and state and federal governments to better prepare, understand and adapt to inundation and other dangers caused by severe weather and sea level rise. We provide everything from education materials to interactive mapping tools and software to transform storm surge model output into geographic data. Our staff also has extensive experience in developing and applying tools for analyzing historic shoreline change for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Mapping and visualization

Lidar-derived elevation data is used by coastal communities to better manage hazards, and ecological restoration and development. IMSG is a principle contributor to the design and operation of a leading repository of lidar data in the U.S., housed within NOAA. Data products from this repository are widely used by industry and state and federal governments. Benthic habitat maps are also an important tool in coastal planning. IMSG is providing expertise for all stages of benthic data management from field collection to interpretation and distribution.

Geospatial database and systems integration

IMSG is the principle architect behind multi-terabyte geospatial databases used by NOAA. These databases include near-line storage arrays and replication services for national-scale data sets distributed by multiple web farms. To aid users in data discovery, IMSG developed and deployed metadata clearinghouses and portals according to FGDC and IEEE standards. For NOAA’s ocean observing program, IMSG's solution was to build on a design of highly distributed data providers using Open Geospatial Consortium protocols and a national catalog of sensor resources.