CA GIS Council: June 9th meeting notes
Constituent initiatives (with web links):
The California Geological Survey has released 7 new Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zone maps in the San Bernardino County and Tahoe Basin areas. These new maps are available at the CGS Information Warehouse.
The city of Walnut Creek will be participating in the Cascadia Rising exercise.
The CA Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment has released an upgrade to their Enviroscreen application.
The State Water Board Environmental Lab Accreditation Program has released their map of water quality lab certifications.
Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Rec recently completed a county-wide needs assessment which based on GIS analysis of study areas throughout the county.
State GIO’s Office Report
John Carotta provided the GIO’s office report and is now the primary GIS contact for the GIO’s office. The office’s responsibilities have expanded to encompass web development and staffing levels have similarly increased, growing from 3 to 34 staff. However, most of the staff are in web development.
Parcels: The GIO’s Office is working to consolidate the contracts individual state agencies have with Digital Map Products into a single master contract that would enable the distribution of parcel information to the state agencies. This contract will only cover distribution to state departments, however. It is unclear whether state agencies will be able to share this information with non-state partners. The contract would be an on-going contract with quarterly data updates.
Elevation: The GIO’s office made a purchase of Intermap’s NEXTMAP elevation data for the state. The 5-meter Digital Terrain Model has already been distributed to a number of state agencies. The Office will soon also distribute the associated Digital Surface Model to state agencies. The NEXTMAP data, as a proprietary product, is only available to State agencies and their partners. The data is still lacking comprehensive metadata (including acquisition date) and errors have been discovered in some of the data.
Innovation Lab: The GIO’s office will soon be announcing the opening of its Innovation Lab site. This site will be open to the public and will enable anyone to generate maps or other data mashups using the services hosted by the state.
GIS Portal Redesign: The GIO’s office is developing a public ArcGIS Online Portal that will supplant the public face of the current State GIS portal. The current Geoportal (http://portal.gis.ca.gov/) will become a secure site for the display and distribution of secure, sensitive or restricted data. The new portal will also adopt a “push” model for the collection of data and metadata in the portal, rather than the current “pull” model of data harvesting from the web. This will hopefully provide more authoritative content to the portal. The new AGOL portal will be up in 2-3 months.
LISTSERV update
The Council decided to migrate all of the existing subscribers on the ca.gis.council listserv to the CA GIS Council website. This will enable the council to continue to reach listserv subscribers should UC Davis’s hosting for the listserv end, and enable further development of the Council’s forum functionality.
Workgroup reports
Geodetic Control: The Council approved the final version of the California SDI Geodetic Control Report Card. This report card could serve as a template for other workgroups, should they wish to adopt a similar format.
DLRI: The DLRI workgroup is meeting to finalize its draft Charter. Nate Roth is working on developing a parcel status map illustrating the availability of open parcel data across the state.
Elevation: Working with State GIO’s and CGS to identify and resolve some of the flaws in the elevation data. The FY17 3DEP program has started its FY17 funding process. Please see the announcement.
NHD: The Department of Water Resources was recently approved funding to become the state data steward for the National Hydrography Dataset starting July 1, 2016. The program is just getting started and new positions will need to be filled. Jane Schafer-Kramer is the interim technical lead for the program. DWR is planning NHD Edit tool training in September in Sacramento. To become an NHD sub-steward and attend the training, contact Jane Schafer-Kramer. In addition, training on the use of the NHD Plus will be held in July in conjunction with the AWRA Specialty Conference on GIS and Water Resources. For more information on the NHD Plus training, visit the California Water and Environmental Modeling Forum website.
UAS Policy: Nearly 20 bills regarding UAS are before the State Legislature. The workgroup has not taken a position on any of the pending bills. With the legislative session coming to an end, passage, suspention or veto of the bills should come in the next couple of weeks. See the UAS Policy Workgroup Status Report – 20160609 for more details.
Strategic Plan: The workgroup had a very productive meeting at CalGIS, with over 20 attendees providing input as to the direction for the Council. Please see the workgroup report for more details.
Announcements / Open Discussion
Bruce Joffe noted that the Cascadia Rising and similar exercises point to a need to develop geodata caches which would be available to local first-responders in event of an emergency. This could be modeled upon the “GIS Specialist” hard drive developed by the US Forest Service for fire response. He recommended forming a workgroup to look comprehensively at this issue. Those interested should contact Bruce Joffe.
The Census is beginning to ramp up its data collection and distribution efforts for the 2020 Census. Interest was expressed by the Council to have a report on these activities at the next Council meeting and to potentially add a Census workgroup to the Council.
Videos from the FOSS4G NA Conference are now online.
The Sierra Nevada Conservancy will be hosting a presentation and discussion on Tuesday, June 21 from 1:00 to 2:30 pm on using LiDAR and hyper-spectral data in assessing tree mortality in the southern Sierra Nevada. For more information, please contact Liz van Wagtendonk.