GLRI Project Presented at MNGIS/LIS Conference

It covers a geographic area 750 miles wide, includes 8 states, a Canadian Province and has a freshwater shoreline of more than 10,000 miles.  What is it?  The Great Lakes basin.

With this lead in, James Klassen and Alison Slaats presented an overview of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative project at the Minnesota GIS/LIS 2012 Conference.  GLRI, funded by the EPA and USFWS, is investing resources to clean up toxic substances, combat invasive species and restore wetland and shore habitats in the Great Lakes basin.   SharedGeo is contributing to these goals by creating a data catalog and mapping tool, CoMap.  Together these tools pull together data from many agencies and organizations across this large geography.

The presentation explained that in addition to the catalog and CoMap, James Klassen has optimized delivery of over 40 TB of imagery and remote sensing data in ready-to-use services.  In addition, it was described how this project was accomplished using open source software, such as GeoMoose, Mapserver and OpenStack Object Storage (Swift).

The presentation was well received and generated some good conversations during and after the conference.   To learn more, see the GLRI presentation slides or check out the GLRI project page.