Broader Impacts

Remote sensed image analysis has application to a broad range of societal problems ranging from resource management to environmental protection. While the proposed work on improving the coverage and fidelity of gazetteers will broadly benefit geographic researchers and practitioners, the proposed framework for integrating image and non-image geographic data will be applicable to other geographic collections such as maps which will benefit other segments of society.

The new University of California campus in Merced, CA opened for undergraduate students in September 2005 as the newest of the 10-campus UC system and the first new US research university of the 21st century. A central mission of UC Merced is to serve the ethnically and economically diverse population of California's San Joaquin Valley. The San Joaquin Valley is the most diverse, fastest growing and economically disadvantaged part of California. Approximately 50% of UC Merced's student body are first-generation college students and a large fraction are from groups under-represented in universities. Notably, over 30% of the student body is Hispanic, and UC Merced has been approved for official U.S. Department of Education status as an Hispanic Serving Institution, making it one of only a handful of universities with this distinction nationwide. The PI is committed to involving students from underrepresented groups in undergraduate research through the RUI component of this grant.

The PI is a member of a multidisciplinary planning committee tasked by the Vice Chancellor of Research to assess the campus needs in the area of spatial analysis. The long-term goal of the committee is to develop a robust spatial analysis infrastructure at UC Merced that would benefit the campus and the California Central Valley. The committee has submitted a plan to the university to establish a Spatial Analysis Research Center (SpARC). The research and educational goals of this award are synergistic with this center and the broader effort on promoting spatial analysis.

Labelled training and test sets created with open data from The National Map will be made publicly available on the this website. Open access to high-resolution remote sensed imagery is a significant development since it allows researchers to evaluate their algorithms on common datasets.