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The Saguaro Digital Library for Natural Asset Management

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T he United States has been endowed with tremendous amount of natural assets in the form of abundant fresh water, ecological habitats, forests, grasslands, fisheries, fertile lands, and climatic conditions. The Arizona Growing Smarter Initiative has been proposed by the State of Arizona in recognition of the value of these natural assets. As part of a new paradigm that is in evidence nationwide and in Arizona, we are recognizing that there is a close link between the economy and the environment and that our natural assets of the arid and semi-arid regions of the U.S. Southwest are facing increasing risk due to a variety of natural and human impacts. There is immediate need to actively conserve biodiversity and protect our natural ecosystems in order to preserve the quality of human life. This requires the use of information technology for enhancing our understanding of the interdependence between the economy and the environment. In response to this need, we propose to develop the Saguaro Digital Library (SDL) - a comprehensive digital library system providing a full range of services to facilitate our understanding of the impacts of natural and human environmental hazards, to provide models of environmental change that can access and utilize data, processing tools and algorithms across the Internet, and to provide a wide range of users the ability to obtain quantitative measures of this change. The primary focus of the SDL is to facilitate the responsible stewardship of our natural assets and good ecosystem management. Our project will directly address the goals of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) by developing the capability to share data and resources so that biodiversity and ecosystem findings can be more readily applied in management and policy. The library will specifically provide decision support tools to improve monitoring of ecosystem status, better predict and mitigate change, and optimize sustainable productivity. This proposal addresses the key issues of (a) interoperability among digital library collections, (b) harvesting of resources to provide a living and evolving digital library, (c) ensuring long term sustainability of the library, and (d) addressing the needs of a wide variety of users especially those who are not experts in the use of remotely sensed data and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The ultimate goal of our project is to allow components of the digital library to evolve independently and yet be able to call on one another efficiently and conveniently. Thus, our digital library will support heterogeneous and federated collections of digital content, including data, metadata, models, tools, and algorithms. The Saguaro Digital Library is being developed by a consortium of University research groups, Federal and State agencies in conjunction with industrial partners. State Agencies partnering in this proposal include the Arizona State Lands Department, the Arizona State Cartographers Office, The Arizona State Geological Survey, and The Arizona Geographic Information Council. Federal Agencies participating in the project include, the United State Geological Survey (USGS) Cooperative Park Studies Unit, The US Army, The Rocky Mountain Research Station, Los Alamos National Laboratory, The Nature Conservancy, and the US National Park Service. Our industrial part-ners involved in the proposal include Online Computer Library Center Inc. (OCLC), Raytheon STX, and Simons International Corporation. Our K-12 partners include Lawrence Intermediate School, Fort Lowell Elementary School, and the Vail School District from Arizona. The development of the library will be led by the Department of Management Information Systems in collaboration with other departments at the University of Arizona (UA) including, the UA Library, Hydrology and Water Resources, Arid Land Studies, Geography, Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Arizona Regional Image Archive, and Renewable Natural Resources. We have a commitment and plan to sustain the library through the efforts of the UA USGS Biological Resources Division after the funding period.


Please click HERE for a PowerPoint presentation of the project.

Please click HERE for a demo of the prototype system of the project.

For more information, please contact us.