Geographical and Geospatial Sciences Committee

Consensus

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The central purpose of all research is to create new knowledge. In the geographical sciences this is driven by a desire to create new knowledge about the relations between space, place, and the anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic features and processes of the Earth. But some research goes beyond these modest aims and creates new opportunities for further research, or affects the process of knowledge acquisition more broadly, or changes the way other researchers in a domain think about the world and go about their business.

Due to its positive impacts, transformative research can be regarded as inherently having greater value than more conventional research, and funding agencies clearly regard transformative research as something to be encouraged and funded through special programs. Assessments of transformative research funding initiatives are few and provide a mixed picture of their effectiveness. The challenge is whether transformative research can be identified at the time it is proposed rather than after it has been conducted, communicated, and its influence on the discipline has become clear. Fostering Transformative Research in the Geographical Sciences reviews how transformative research has emerged in the past, what its early markers were, and makes recommendations for how it can be nurtured in the future.

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92 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-38934-8
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-38935-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/21881

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Fostering Transformative Research in the Geographical Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Although ecosystems, humans, and fire have coexisted for millennia, changes in geology, ecology, hydrology, and climate as well as sociocultural, regulatory, and economic factors have converged to make wildland fire management exceptionally challenging for U.S. federal, state, and local authorities. Given the mounting, unsustainable costs and difficulty translating existing wildland fire science into policy, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a 1-day workshop to focus on how a century of wildland fire research can contribute to improving wildland fire management. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

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108 pages · 7 x 10 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-46004-2
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-46005-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/24792

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. A Century of Wildland Fire Research: Contributions to Long-term Approaches for Wildland Fire Management: Proceedings of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Consensus

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The United States faces numerous, varied, and evolving threats to national security, including terrorism, scarcity and disruption of food and water supplies, extreme weather events, and regional conflicts around the world. Effectively managing these threats requires intelligence that not only assesses what is happening now, but that also anticipates potential future threats. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is responsible for providing geospatial intelligence on other countries—assessing where exactly something is, what it is, and why it is important—in support of national security, disaster response, and humanitarian assistance. NGA's approach today relies heavily on imagery analysis and mapping, which provide an assessment of current and past conditions. However, augmenting that approach with a strong modeling capability would enable NGA to also anticipate and explore future outcomes.

A model is a simplified representation of a real-world system that is used to extract explainable insights about the system, predict future outcomes, or explore what might happen under plausible what-if scenarios. Such models use data and/or theory to specify inputs (e.g., initial conditions, boundary conditions, and model parameters) to produce an output.

From Maps to Models: Augmenting the Nation's Geospatial Intelligence Capabilities describes the types of models and analytical methods used to understand real-world systems, discusses what would be required to make these models and methods useful for geospatial intelligence, and identifies supporting research and development for NGA. This report provides examples of models that have been used to help answer the sorts of questions NGA might ask, describes how to go about a model-based investigation, and discusses models and methods that are relevant to NGA's mission.

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134 pages · 8.5 x 11 ·
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-44992-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/23650

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016. From Maps to Models: Augmenting the Nation's Geospatial Intelligence Capabilities. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Consensus

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People are constantly changing the land surface through construction, agriculture, energy production, and other activities. Changes both in how land is used by people (land use) and in the vegetation, rock, buildings, and other physical material that cover the Earth's surface (land cover) can be described and future land change can be projected using land-change models (LCMs). LCMs are a key means for understanding how humans are reshaping the Earth's surface in the past and present, for forecasting future landscape conditions, and for developing policies to manage our use of resources and the environment at scales ranging from an individual parcel of land in a city to vast expanses of forests around the world.

Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements describes various LCM approaches, suggests guidance for their appropriate application, and makes recommendations to improve the integration of observation strategies into the models. This report provides a summary and evaluation of several modeling approaches, and their theoretical and empirical underpinnings, relative to complex land-change dynamics and processes, and identifies several opportunities for further advancing the science, data, and cyberinfrastructure involved in the LCM enterprise. Because of the numerous models available, the report focuses on describing the categories of approaches used along with selected examples, rather than providing a review of specific models. Additionally, because all modeling approaches have relative strengths and weaknesses, the report compares these relative to different purposes. Advancing Land Change Modeling's recommendations for assessment of future data and research needs will enable model outputs to better assist the science, policy, and decisionsupport communities.

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152 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-28833-9
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-28834-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/18385

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National Research Council. 2014. Advancing Land Change Modeling: Opportunities and Research Requirements. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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We live in a changing world with multiple and evolving threats to national security, including terrorism, asymmetrical warfare (conflicts between agents with different military powers or tactics), and social unrest. Visually depicting and assessing these threats using imagery and other geographically-referenced information is the mission of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). As the nature of the threat evolves, so do the tools, knowledge, and skills needed to respond. The challenge for NGA is to maintain a workforce that can deal with evolving threats to national security, ongoing scientific and technological advances, and changing skills and expectations of workers.

Future U.S. Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence assesses the supply of expertise in 10 geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) fields, including 5 traditional areas (geodesy and geophysics, photogrammetry, remote sensing, cartographic science, and geographic information systems and geospatial analysis) and 5 emerging areas that could improve geospatial intelligence (GEOINT fusion, crowdsourcing, human geography, visual analytics, and forecasting). The report also identifies gaps in expertise relative to NGA's needs and suggests ways to ensure an adequate supply of geospatial intelligence expertise over the next 20 years.

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184 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-26864-8
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-26865-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/18265

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National Research Council. 2013. Future U.S. Workforce for Geospatial Intelligence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Science is increasingly driven by data, and spatial data underpin the science directions laid out in the 2007 U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Science Strategy. A robust framework of spatial data, metadata, tools, and a user community that is interactively connected to use spatial data in an efficient and flexible way—known as a spatial data infrastructure (SDI)—must be available for scientists and managers to find, use, and share spatial data both within and beyond the USGS.

Over the last decade, the USGS has conducted breakthrough research that has overcome some of the challenges associated with implementing a large SDI. Advancing Strategic Science: A Spatial Data Infrastructure Roadmap for the U.S. Geological Survey is intended to ground those efforts by providing a practical roadmap to full implementation of an SDI to enable the USGS to conduct strategic science.

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132 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-26457-X
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-26458-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/13506

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National Research Council. 2012. Advancing Strategic Science: A Spatial Data Infrastructure Roadmap for the U.S. Geological Survey. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Natural disasters—including hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods—caused more than 220,000 deaths worldwide in the first half of 2010 and wreaked havoc on homes, buildings, and the environment. To withstand and recover from natural and human-caused disasters, it is essential that citizens and communities work together to anticipate threats, limit their effects, and rapidly restore functionality after a crisis.

Increasing evidence indicates that collaboration between the private and public sectors could improve the ability of a community to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. Several previous National Research Council reports have identified specific examples of the private and public sectors working cooperatively to reduce the effects of a disaster by implementing building codes, retrofitting buildings, improving community education, or issuing extreme-weather warnings. State and federal governments have acknowledged the importance of collaboration between private and public organizations to develop planning for disaster preparedness and response. Despite growing ad hoc experience across the country, there is currently no comprehensive framework to guide private-public collaboration focused on disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.

Building Community Disaster Resilience through Private-Public Collaboration assesses the current state of private-public sector collaboration dedicated to strengthening community resilience, identifies gaps in knowledge and practice, and recommends research that could be targeted for investment. Specifically, the book finds that local-level private-public collaboration is essential to the development of community resilience. Sustainable and effective resilience-focused private-public collaboration is dependent on several basic principles that increase communication among all sectors of the community, incorporate flexibility into collaborative networks, and encourage regular reassessment of collaborative missions, goals, and practices.

Additional materials

Pamphlet

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142 pages · 7 x 10 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-16263-7
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-16264-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/13028

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National Research Council. 2011. Building Community Disaster Resilience Through Private-Public Collaboration. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) within the Department of Defense has the primary mission of providing timely, relevant, and accurate imagery, imagery intelligence, and geospatial information—collectively known as geospatial intelligence (GEOINT)—in support of national security. In support of its mission, NGA sponsors research that builds the scientific foundation for geospatial intelligence and that reinforces the academic base, thus training the next generation of NGA analysts while developing new approaches to analytical problems. Historically, NGA has supported research in five core areas: (1) photogrammetry and geomatics, (2) remote sensing and imagery science, (3) geodesy and geophysics, (4) cartographic science, and (5) geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial analysis.

Positioning NGA for the future is the responsibility of the InnoVision Directorate, which analyzes intelligence trends, technological advances, and emerging customer and partner concepts to provide cutting-edge technology and process solutions. At the request of InnoVision, the National Research Council (NRC) held a 3-day workshop to explore the evolution of the five core research areas and to identify emerging disciplines that may improve the quality of geospatial intelligence over the next 15 years. This workshop report offers a potential research agenda that would expand NGA's capabilities and improve its effectiveness in providing geospatial intelligence.

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70 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-15865-6
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-15866-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12964

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National Research Council. 2010. New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: Workshop Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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From the oceans to continental heartlands, human activities have altered the physical characteristics of Earth's surface. With Earth's population projected to peak at 8 to 12 billion people by 2050 and the additional stress of climate change, it is more important than ever to understand how and where these changes are happening. Innovation in the geographical sciences has the potential to advance knowledge of place-based environmental change, sustainability, and the impacts of a rapidly changing economy and society.

Understanding the Changing Planet outlines eleven strategic directions to focus research and leverage new technologies to harness the potential that the geographical sciences offer.

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Press Release

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172 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-15075-2
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-15076-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12860

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National Research Council. 2010. Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) on the United States prompted a rethinking of how the United States prepares for disasters. Federal policy documents written since 9/11 have stressed that the private and public sectors share equal responsibility for the security of the nation's critical infrastructure and key assets. Private sector entities have a role in the safety, security, and resilience of the communities in which they operate. Incentivizing the private sector to expend resources on community efforts remains challenging. Disasters in the United States since 9/11 (e.g., Hurricane Katrina in 2005) indicate that the nation has not yet been successful in making its communities resilient to disaster.

In this book, the National Research Council assesses the current states of the art and practice in private-public sector collaboration dedicated to strengthening community disaster resilience.

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86 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-15106-6
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-15107-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12864

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National Research Council. 2010. Private-Public Sector Collaboration to Enhance Community Disaster Resilience: A Workshop Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the identification of the relationships and attributes of members, key actors, and groups that social networks comprise. The National Research Council, at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, held a two-day workshop on the use of SNA for the purpose of building community disaster resilience. The workshop, summarized in this volume, was designed to provide guidance to the DHS on a potential research agenda that would increase the effectiveness of SNA for improving community disaster resilience.
The workshop explored the state of the art in SNA and its applications in the identification, construction, and strengthening of networks within U.S. communities. Workshop participants discussed current work in SNA focused on characterizing networks; the theories, principles and research applicable to the design or strengthening of networks; the gaps in knowledge that prevent the application of SNA to the construction of networks; and research areas that could fill those gaps. Elements of a research agenda to support the design, development, and implementation of social networks for the specific purpose of strengthening community resilience against natural and human-made disasters were discussed.

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80 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-14094-3
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-14095-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12706

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National Research Council. 2009. Applications of Social Network Analysis for Building Community Disaster Resilience: Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Maps portray the height and extent to which flooding is expected to occur, and they form the basis for setting flood insurance premiums and regulating development in the floodplain. As such, they are an important tool for individuals, businesses, communities, and government agencies to understand and deal with flood hazard and flood risk. Improving map accuracy is therefore not an academic question—better maps help everyone.

Making and maintaining an accurate flood map is neither simple nor inexpensive. Even after an investment of more than $1 billion to take flood maps into the digital world, only 21 percent of the population has maps that meet or exceed national flood hazard data quality thresholds. Even when floodplains are mapped with high accuracy, land development and natural changes to the landscape or hydrologic systems create the need for continuous map maintenance and updates.

Mapping the Zone examines the factors that affect flood map accuracy, assesses the benefits and costs of more accurate flood maps, and recommends ways to improve flood mapping, communication, and management of flood-related data.

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136 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-13057-3
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-13058-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12573

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National Research Council. 2009. Mapping the Zone: Improving Flood Map Accuracy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Land parcel data (also known as cadastral data) provide geographically referenced information about the rights, interests, and ownership of land and are an important part of the financial, legal, and real estate systems of society. The data are used by governments to make decisions about land development, business activities, regulatory compliance, emergency response, and law enforcement. In 1980, a National Research Council book called for nationally integrated land parcel data, but despite major progress in the development of land parcel databases in many local jurisdictions, little progress has been made toward a national system.

National Land Parcel Data looks at the current status of land parcel data in the United States. The book concludes that nationally integrated land parcel data is necessary, feasible, and affordable. It provides recommendations for establishing a practical framework for sustained intergovernmental coordination and funding required to overcome the remaining challenges and move forward.

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172 pages · 7 x 10 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-11030-0
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-11031-9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/11978

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National Research Council. 2007. National Land Parcel Data: A Vision for the Future. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Comprehensive and authoritative baseline geospatial data content is crucial to the nation and to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS founded its Center of Excellence for Geospatial Information Science (CEGIS) in 2006 to develop and distribute national geospatial data assets in a fast-moving information technology environment. In order to fulfill this mission, the USGS asked the National Research Council to assess current GIScience capabilities at the USGS, identify current and future needs for GIScience capabilities, recommend strategies for strengthening these capabilities and for collaborating with others to maximize research productivity, and make recommendations regarding the most effective research areas for CEGIS to pursue. With an initial focus on improving the capabilities of The National Map, the report recommends three priority research areas for CEGIS: information access and dissemination, data integration, and data models, and further identifies research topics within these areas that CEGIS should pursue. To address these research topics, CEGIS needs a sustainable research management process that involves a portfolio of collaborative research that balances short and long term goals.

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156 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-11154-4
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-11155-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/12004

Suggested citation

National Research Council. 2007. A Research Agenda for Geographic Information Science at the United States Geological Survey. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Floodplain maps serve as the basis for determining whether homes or buildings require flood insurance under the National Flood Insurance Program run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Approximately $650 billion in insured assets are now covered under the program. FEMA is modernizing floodplain maps to better serve the program. However, concerns have been raised as to the adequacy of the base map information available to support floodplain map modernization.

Elevation Data for Floodplain Mapping shows that there is sufficient two-dimensional base map imagery to meet FEMA's flood map modernization goals, but that the three-dimensional base elevation data that are needed to determine whether a building should have flood insurance are not adequate. This book makes recommendations for a new national digital elevation data collection program to redress the inadequacy.

Policy makers; property insurance professionals; federal, local, and state governments; and others concerned with natural disaster prevention and preparedness will find this book of interest.

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Press Release

Publication information

166 pages · 7 x 10 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-10409-2
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-66807-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/11829

Suggested citation

National Research Council. 2007. Elevation Data for Floodplain Mapping. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Geographical and Geospatial Sciences Committee

Fostering Transformative Research in the Geographical Sciences

Publications