Goal 1: Increase the awareness and understanding of the vision, concepts, and benefits of the NSDI through outreach and education.
NRCS supports this goal by:
ü Supporting FGDC standards development efforts and sharing these standards with partners and cooperators.
ü Making every effort to ensure NRCS data partners generate FGDC compliant metadata to support NSDI efforts.
ü Encouraging NRCS partners to participate in federal coordination efforts through use of the clearinghouse and standards development.
ü Supporting the efforts of the Dane County, WI demonstration project.
ü Ensuring the inclusion of the Community Federal Information Partnership (CFIP) initiative in the FY2000 and FY2001 NRCS budgets.
ü Participate in the FGDC Design Study Team efforts to assist in redefining FGDC and interaction with partners.
ü Maintaining cooperative development agreement with MIT for the development and maintenance of the MIT Ortho server. Capabilities were developed cooperatively for the distribution of seamless DOQ to NRCS and other offices.
Goal 2: Develop common solution for discovery, access and use of geospatial data in response to the needs of diverse communities.
ü Continue to participate in the NDOP efforts to coordinate the generation of DOQ for USDA/NRCS applications.
ü Participate in a variety of efforts to facilitate the development and access of data. These include Digital Earth, FGDC, Aurora project, the National Atlas efforts, National Digital Ortho Program and the OpenGIS Consortium.
ü Deploy computer hardware with a common computing environment to NRCS field offices to facilitate access to standard interface tools for GIS applications.
ü USDA has developed tools to facilitate field based planning using geospatial data. Tools have been developed using FGDC standard data and metadata formats.
ü NRCS maintains an NSDI clearinghouse node at the National Cartography and Geospatial center in Ft. Worth Texas.
ü Digital data generated and posted by NRCS are offered in a variety of formats to facilitated access by many of customers.
Goal 3: Use community based approaches to develop and maintain common collections of geospatial data for sound decision making.
ü Continue to support the FGDC demonstration project in Dane County, WI
ü Continue to generate digital soil data meeting NRCS and FGDC standards and post data to a publicly accessible web site. The collection and development of digital soils is done in partnership under the National Cooperative Soils Survey.
ü Continue to support the development of detailed watershed boundaries, climate data, collection of the Natural Resources Inventory data, and other layers which support USDA field based activities.
ü Support the National cooperative Soils Survey, Soil and Water Conservation District partnerships the Resource Conservation Districts and other locally based delivery partnerships.
ü Work with customers and local data users to meet as many of their digital data needs as resources permit.
Goal 4: Build relationships among organizations to support the continuing development of the NSDI.
ü Actively participate in federal digital data development and coordination efforts. These include but are not limited to the FGDC and DE efforts.
ü Maintain local partnerships as mandated by agency mission, such as the National Cooperative Soil Survey, Soil and Water Conservation Districts and the Resource Conservation District partnerships. Ensure that data development partnerships fulfill the needs of all the partners
ü Continue partnerships in NAPP and NDOP
ü Participate at the management and technical level with the OpenGIS Consortium.
ü Work with partners and NRCS program managers to develop national digital layers addressing their program management needs. Offer these layers to the same organizations as a “base product” for the acceptance of GIS.