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DOE OSTI2025

GIScience in the era of Artificial Intelligence: a research agenda towards Autonomous GIS

The advent of generative AI exemplified by large language models (LLMs) opens new ways to represent and compute geographic information and transcends the process of geographic knowledge production, driving geographic information systems (GIS) towards autonomous GIS. Leveraging LLMs as the decision core, autonomous GIS can independently generate and execute geoprocessing workflows to perform spatial analysis. In this vision paper, we further elaborate on the concept of autonomous GIS and present a conceptual framework that defines its five autonomous goals, five levels of autonomy, five core functions, and three operational scales. We demonstrate how autonomous GIS could perform geospatial data retrieval, spatial analysis, and map making with four proof-of-concept GIS agents. We conclude by identifying critical challenges and future research directions, including fine-tuning and self-growing decision-cores, autonomous modelling, and examining the societal and practical implications of autonomous GIS. By establishing the groundwork for a paradigm shift in GIScience, this paper envisions a future where GIS moves beyond traditional workflows to autonomously reason, derive, innovate, and advance geospatial solutions to pressing global challenges. Meanwhile, we emphasize that as we design and deploy increasingly intelligent geospatial systems, we carry a responsibility to ensure they are developed in socially responsible ways, serve the public good, and support the continued value of human geographic insight in an AI-augmented future.

Autonomous GI↗

NASA NTRS1992

Category identification of changed land-use polygons in an integrated image processing/geographic information system

A framework is proposed for analyzing ancillary data and developing procedures for incorporating ancillary data to aid interactive identification of land-use categories in land-use updates. The procedures were developed for use within an integrated image processsing/geographic information systems (GIS) that permits simultaneous display of digital image data with the vector land-use data to be updated. With such systems and procedures, automated techniques are integrated with visual-based manual interpretation to exploit the capabilities of both. The procedural framework developed was applied as part of a case study to update a portion of the land-use layer in a regional scale GIS. About 75 percent of the area in the study site that experienced a change in land use was correctly labeled into 19 categories using the combination of automated and visual interpretation procedures developed in the study.

Westmoreland, Sally↗

NASA NTRS1991

Development of a prototype spatial information processing system for hydrologic research

Significant advances have been made in the last decade in the areas of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis technology, both in hardware and software. Science user requirements are so problem specific that currently no single system can satisfy all of the needs. The work presented here forms part of a conceptual framework for an all-encompassing science-user workstation system. While definition and development of the system as a whole will take several years, it is intended that small scale projects such as the current work will address some of the more short term needs. Such projects can provide a quick mechanism to integrate tools into the workstation environment forming a larger, more complete hydrologic analysis platform. Described here are two components that are very important to the practical use of remote sensing and digital map data in hydrology. Described here is a graph-theoretic technique to rasterize elevation contour maps. Also described is a system to manipulate synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data files and extract soil moisture data.

Sircar, Jayanta K.↗

NASA NTRS1995

Geographic Information System Data Analysis

Data was collected in order to further NASA Langley Research Center's Geographic Information System(GIS). Information on LaRC's communication, electrical, and facility configurations was collected. Existing data was corrected through verification, resulting in more accurate databases. In addition, Global Positioning System(GPS) points were used in order to accurately impose buildings on digitized images. Overall, this project will help the Imaging and CADD Technology Team (ICTT) prove GIS to be a valuable resource for LaRC.

Billings, Chad↗

NASA NTRS1987

Land cover change detection using a GIS-guided, feature-based classification of Landsat thematic mapper data

Landsat TM data were combined with land cover and planimetric data layers contained in the State of Michigan's geographic information system (GIS) to identify changes in forestlands, specifically new oil/gas wells. A GIS-guided feature-based classification method was developed. The regions extracted by the best image band/operator combination were studied using a set of rules based on the characteristics of the GIS oil/gas pads.

Enslin, William R.↗

DOE OSTI2024

Mauka Energy FEVER Tool DOE SBIR Phase 1 Final Scientific/Technical Report

This report is on the Forestry Electric Vehicle Energy Routing (FEVER) Tool, a novel software system developed to support heavy-duty electric vehicle (EV) operations in remote, forested, and mountainous regions. The Phase I project aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of modeling EV energy consumption using terrain elevation, road conditions, and route features specific to forestry logistics. The tool combines geographic information systems (GIS), electric motor physics, and vehicle-specific data to calculate feasible, energy-efficient routes. Collaborations with Oregon State University’s Research Forests and Titan Freight Systems enabled collection and validation of GPS and elevation-based trip data. The FEVER Tool offers substantial opportunities for the efficient management of medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles in sectors like forestry, agriculture, mining, defense and waste management—areas which are beginning to adopt HDEVs. The project demonstrated technical feasibility and lays the groundwork for commercial development and deployment in other industries and environmental conditions in Phase II.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

NASA NTRS1982

Development of LANDSAT Derived Forest Cover Information for Integration into Adirondack Park GIS

Based upon observed changes in timber harvest practices partially attributable to forest biomass removable for energy supply purposes, the Adirondack Park Agency began in 1979 a multi-year project to implement a digital geographic information system (GIS). An initial developmental task was an inventory of forest cover information and analysis of forest resource change and availability. While developing the GIS, a pilot project was undertaken to evaluate the usefulness of LANDSAT derived land cover information for this purpose, and to explore the integration of LANDSAT data into the GIS. The prototype LANDSAT analysis project involved: (1) the use of both recent and historic data to derive land cover information for two dates; and (2) comparison of land cover over time to determine quantitative and geographic changes. The "recent data," 1978 full foliage data over portions of four LANDSAT scenes, was classified, using ground truth derived training samples in various forested and non-forested categories. Forested categories include the following: northern hardwoods, pine, spruce-fir, and pine plantation, while nonforested categories include wet-conifer, pasture, grassland, urban, exposed soil, agriculture, and water.

Curran, R. P.↗

NASA NTRS2008

Emergency Response Virtual Environment for Safe Schools

An intelligent emergency response virtual environment (ERVE) that provides emergency first responders, response planners, and managers with situational awareness as well as training and support for safe schools is presented. ERVE incorporates an intelligent agent facility for guiding and assisting the user in the context of the emergency response operations. Response information folders capture key information about the school. The system enables interactive 3D visualization of schools and academic campuses, including the terrain and the buildings' exteriors and interiors in an easy to use Web..based interface. ERVE incorporates live camera and sensors feeds and can be integrated with other simulations such as chemical plume simulation. The system is integrated with a Geographical Information System (GIS) to enable situational awareness of emergency events and assessment of their effect on schools in a geographic area. ERVE can also be integrated with emergency text messaging notification systems. Using ERVE, it is now possible to address safe schools' emergency management needs with a scaleable, seamlessly integrated and fully interactive intelligent and visually compelling solution.

Wasfy, Ayman↗

NASA NTRS1981

A data base approach for prediction of deforestation-induced mass wasting events

A major topic of concern in timber management is determining the impact of clear-cutting on slope stability. Deforestation treatments on steep mountain slopes have often resulted in a high frequency of major mass wasting events. The Geographic Information System (GIS) is a potentially useful tool for predicting the location of mass wasting sites. With a raster-based GIS, digitally encoded maps of slide hazard parameters can be overlayed and modeled to produce new maps depicting high probability slide areas. The present investigation has the objective to examine the raster-based information system as a tool for predicting the location of the clear-cut mountain slopes which are most likely to experience shallow soil debris avalanches. A literature overview is conducted, taking into account vegetation, roads, precipitation, soil type, slope-angle and aspect, and models predicting mass soil movements. Attention is given to a data base approach and aspects of slide prediction.

Logan, T. L.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Soil conservation applications with C-band SAR

Soil conservation programs are becoming more important as the growing human population exerts greater pressure on this non-renewable resource. Indeed, soil degradation affects approximately 10 percent of Canada's agricultural land with an estimated loss of 6,000 hectares of topsoil annually from Ontario farmland alone. Soil loss not only affects agricultural productivity but also decreases water quality and can lead to siltation problems. Thus, there is a growing demand for soil conservation programs and a need to develop an effective monitoring system. Topography and soil type information can easily be handled within a geographic information system (GIS). Information about vegetative cover type and surface roughness, which both experience considerable temporal change, can be obtained from remote sensing techniques. For further development of the technology to produce an operational soil conservation monitoring system, an experiment was conducted in Oxford County, Ontario which investigated the separability of fall surface cover type using C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data.

Brisco, B.↗

NASA NTRS1997

Evaluation of GIS Technology in Assessing and Modeling Land Management Practices

There is an increasing concern of land owners to protect and maintain healthy and sustainable agroecosystems through the implementation of best management practices (BMP). The objectives of this study were: (1) To develop and evaluate the use of a Geographic Information System (GIS) technology for enhancing field-scale management practices; (2) evaluate the use of 2-dimensional displays of the landscape and (3) define spatial classes of variables from interpretation of geostatistical parameters. Soil samples were collected to a depth of 2 m at 15 cm increments. Existing data from topographic, land use, and soil survey maps of the Winfred Thomas Agricultural Research Station were converted to digital format. Additional soils data which included texture, pH, and organic matter were also generated. The digitized parameters were used to create a multilayered field-scale GIS. Two dimensional (2-D) displays of the parameters were generated using the ARC/INFO software. The spatial distribution of the parameters evaluated in both fields were similar which could be attributed to the similarity in vegetation and surface elevation. The ratio of the nugget to total semivariance, expressed as a percentage, was used to assess the degree of spatial variability. The results indicated that most of the parameters were moderate spatially dependent Biophysical constraint maps were generated from the database layers, and used in multiple combination to visualize results of the BMP. Understanding the spatial relationships of physical and chemical parameters that exists within a field should enable land managers to more effectively implement BMP to ensure a safe and sustainable environment.

Archer, F.↗

NASA NTRS2009

Impacts of a Changing Climate and Land Use on Reindeer Pastoralism: Indigenous Knowledge and Remote Sensing

The Arctic is home to many indigenous peoples, including those who depend on reindeer herding for their livelihood, in one of the harshest environments in the world. For the largely nomadic peoples, reindeer not only form a substantial part of the Arctic food base and economy, but they are also culturally important, shaping their way of life, mythologies, festivals and ceremonies. Reindeer pastoralism or husbandry has been practiced by numerous peoples all across Eurasia for thousands of years and involves moving herds of reindeer, which are very docile animals, from pasture to pasture depending on the season. Thus, herders must adapt on a daily basis to find optimal conditions for their herds according to the constantly changing conditions. Climate change and variability plus rapid development are increasingly creating major changes in the physical environment, ecology, and cultures of these indigenous reindeer herder communities in the North, and climate changes are occurring significantly faster in the Arctic than the rest of the globe, with correspondingly dramatic impacts (Oskal, 2008). In response to these changes, Eurasian reindeer herders have created the EALAT project, a comprehensive new initiative to study these impacts and to develop local adaptation strategies based upon their traditional knowledge of the land and its uses - in targeted partnership with the science and remote sensing community - involving extensive collaborations and coproduction of knowledge to minimize the impacts of the various changes. This chapter provides background on climate and development challenges to reindeer husbandry across the Arctic and an overview of the EALAT initiative, with an emphasis on indigenous knowledge, remote sensing, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and other scientific data to 'co-produce' datasets for use by herders for improved decision-making and herd management. It also provides a description of the EALAT monitoring data integration and sharing system and portal being developed for reindeer pastoralism. In addition, the chapter provides some preliminary results from the EALAT Project, including some early remote sensing research results.

Maynard, N. G.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Design and test of an object-oriented GIS to map plant species in the Southern Rockies

Elevational and latitudinal shifts occur in the flora of the Rocky Mountains due to long term climate change. In order to specify which species are successfully migrating with these changes, and which are not, an object-oriented, image-based geographic information system (GIS) is being created to animate evolving ecological regimes of temperature and precipitation. Research at the Earth Data Analysis Center (EDAC) is developing a landscape model that includes the spatial, spectral and temporal domains. It is designed to visualize migratory changes in the Rocky Mountain flora, and to specify future community compositions. The object-oriented database will eventually tag each of the nearly 6000 species with a unique hue, intensity, and saturation value, so their movements can be individually traced. An associated GIS includes environmental parameters that control the distribution of each species in the landscape, and satellite imagery is used to help visualize the terrain. Polygons for the GIS are delineated as landform facets that are static in ecological time. The model manages these facets as a triangular irregular net (TIN), and their analysis assesses the gradual progression of species as they migrate through the TIN. Using an appropriate climate change model, the goal will be to stop the modeling process to assess both the rate and direction of species' change and to specify the changing community composition of each landscape facet.

Morain, Stanley A.↗

NASA NTRS1982

GIS Integration for Quantitatively Determining the Capabilities of Five Remote Sensors for Resource Exploration

To assist the U.S. Geological Survey in carrying out a Congressional mandate to investigate the use of side-looking airborne radar (SLAR) for resources exploration, a research program was conducted to define the contribution of SLAR imagery to structural geologic mapping and to compare this with contributions from other remote sensing systems. Imagery from two SLAR systems and from three other remote sensing systems was interpreted, and the resulting information was digitized, quantified and intercompared using a computer-assisted geographic information system (GIS). The study area covers approximately 10,000 square miles within the Naval Petroleum Reserve, Alaska, and is situated between the foothills of the Brooks Range and the North Slope. The principal objectives were: (1) to establish quantitatively, the total information contribution of each of the five remote sensing systems to the mapping of structural geology; (2) to determine the amount of information detected in common when the sensors are used in combination; and (3) to determine the amount of unique, incremental information detected by each sensor when used in combination with others. The remote sensor imagery that was investigated included real-aperture and synthetic-aperture radar imagery, standard and digitally enhanced LANDSAT MSS imagery, and aerial photos.

Pascucci, R. F.↗

NASA NTRS1998

Integration of GIS, Geostatistics, and 3-D Technology to Assess the Spatial Distribution of Soil Moisture

The spatial and temporal distribution of near surface soil moisture is of fundamental importance to many physical, biological, biogeochemical, and hydrological processes. However, knowledge of these space-time dynamics and the processes which control them remains unclear. The integration of geographic information systems (GIS) and geostatistics together promise a simple mechanism to evaluate and display the spatial and temporal distribution of this vital hydrologic and physical variable. Therefore, this research demonstrates the use of geostatistics and GIS to predict and display soil moisture distribution under vegetated and non-vegetated plots. The research was conducted at the Winfred Thomas Agricultural Experiment Station (WTAES), Hazel Green, Alabama. Soil moisture measurement were done on a 10 by 10 m grid from tall fescue grass (GR), alfalfa (AA), bare rough (BR), and bare smooth (BS) plots. Results indicated that variance associated with soil moisture was higher for vegetated plots than non-vegetated plots. The presence of vegetation in general contributed to the spatial variability of soil moisture. Integration of geostatistics and GIS can improve the productivity of farm lands and the precision of farming.

Betts, M.↗

NASA NTRS2008

Providing Internet Access to High-Resolution Mars Images

The OnMars server is a computer program that provides Internet access to high-resolution Mars images, maps, and elevation data, all suitable for use in geographical information system (GIS) software for generating images, maps, and computational models of Mars. The OnMars server is an implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) server. Unlike other Mars Internet map servers that provide Martian data using an Earth coordinate system, the OnMars WMS server supports encoding of data in Mars-specific coordinate systems. The OnMars server offers access to most of the available high-resolution Martian image and elevation data, including an 8-meter-per-pixel uncontrolled mosaic of most of the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Observer Camera Narrow Angle (MOCNA) image collection, which is not available elsewhere. This server can generate image and map files in the tagged image file format (TIFF), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), 8- or 16-bit Portable Network Graphics (PNG), or Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format. Image control is provided by use of the OGC Style Layer Descriptor (SLD) protocol. The OnMars server also implements tiled WMS protocol and super-overlay KML for high-performance client application programs.

Plesea, Lucian↗

NASA NTRS2008

Providing Internet Access to High-Resolution Lunar Images

The OnMoon server is a computer program that provides Internet access to high-resolution Lunar images, maps, and elevation data, all suitable for use in geographical information system (GIS) software for generating images, maps, and computational models of the Moon. The OnMoon server implements the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) server protocol and supports Moon-specific extensions. Unlike other Internet map servers that provide Lunar data using an Earth coordinate system, the OnMoon server supports encoding of data in Moon-specific coordinate systems. The OnMoon server offers access to most of the available high-resolution Lunar image and elevation data. This server can generate image and map files in the tagged image file format (TIFF) or the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), 8- or 16-bit Portable Network Graphics (PNG), or Keyhole Markup Language (KML) format. Image control is provided by use of the OGC Style Layer Descriptor (SLD) protocol. Full-precision spectral arithmetic processing is also available, by use of a custom SLD extension. This server can dynamically add shaded relief based on the Lunar elevation to any image layer. This server also implements tiled WMS protocol and super-overlay KML for high-performance client application programs.

Plesea, Lucian↗

NASA NTRS2005

NASA GES DISC DAAC Satellite Data for GIS

NASA's Goddard Earth Science (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) makes available a large and continually growing collection of spatially continuous global satellite observations of environmental parameters. These products include those from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on both Terra and Aqua platforms, and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). These data products are well suited for use within Geographic Information Systems (GIS), as both backdrops to cartographic products as well as spatial analysis. However, data format, file size, and other issues have limited their widespread use by traditional GIS users. To address these data usability issues, the GES DISC DAAC recently updated tools and improved documentation of conversion procedures. In addition, the GES DISC DAAC has also been working with a major GIS software vendor to incorporate the ability to read the native Hierarchial Data Format (HDF), the format in which most of the NASA data is stored. The result is the enabling of GIS users to realize the benefit of GES DISC DAAC data without a substantial expenditure in resources to incorporate these data into their GIS. Several documents regarding the potential uses of GES DISC DAAC satellite data in GIS have recently been created. These show the combinations of concurrent data from different satellite products with traditional GIS vector products for given geographic areas. These map products include satellite imagery of Hurricane Isabel and the California wildfires, and can be viewed at http://daac.gsfc.nasa.gov/MODIS/GIS/.

Nickless, Darryl↗