Spatial Information Storehouse

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — University of Arkansas researchers worked with NASA, USAID and Central American countries to create a database of geospatial information for use by government and nonprofit agencies, scientists and others to help make informed decisions about land use.

The data warehouse, called MesoStor, contains climate, soil, rainfall, land cover and infrastructure information, as well as satellite imagery and data from the 1980s to the present. The information spans countries from southern Mexico to Panama.

In one example, most of the countries are using MesoStor and geographic information system (GIS) models developed by CAST researchers to prepare inputs for carbon sequestration models of greenhouse gas production so that they can make estimates for the Kyoto treaty.

“MesoStor is a centralized warehouse that can help these countries coordinate and build geomatics infrastructure,” said Jason Tullis, assistant professor of geosciences in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. “In the carbon stock application, MesoStor and these GIS tools provide a framework for individual countries to prepare future carbon sequestration model input maps on a yearly basis.”

While the data warehouse helps the countries gather carbon sequestration information, it goes much further than that. The collected data may be used to help prepare for hurricanes, earthquakes and landslides, and to monitor urban growth and landscape change.

Many scientists are interested in these and other data found in MesoStor because the Central American countries provide a critical ecological component in the Americas.

“A lot of species depend upon the flyways between North and South America,” said Bruce Gorham, a research assistant with CAST. Changes in the Central American landscape could affect biodiversity everywhere in the Americas. “It’s a critical area and a lot of people are studying it now,” he said.

To create the giant, geospatial storehouse of information, the CAST researchers brought the server to the University of Arkansas campus and input all the information — in the terabyte range -- onto the server during its stay on campus. When they were finished, they broke the server down and shipped it to Panama.

Today, the server is operated by staff in the city of Knowledge in Panama.

Tullis, Gorham and Jackson Cothren, assistant professor of geosciences, have spent many weeks in Panama over the past several years, working with people from Central American governments to train them in the use of the GIS and the remote sensing technologies so that they could create land cover maps for their individual countries.

“All the countries have different priorities,” Cothren said. Belize, for instance, has a strong national forest program, while other countries may emphasize agriculture or tourism.

The information in MesoStor could be used for hurricane and flood hazard prediction and mitigation, to look at the aftereffects of earthquakes and landslides, or to examine patterns of forest loss and urban growth.

To visit MesoStor, please go to http://servir.nsstc.nasa.gov/home.html.