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Kentucky Wins $4.3 Million NASA Project
Frankfort, Kentucky - NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, has awarded the Governor's Office for Technology
(GOT) (http://got.ky.gov) in Frankfort
a $3.1 million award as part of a $4.3 million project to further
their work on bringing geospatial information to the people of
Kentucky, with other funding being provided by the project partners.
The
project will enable citizens; businesses and government agencies
to access information that
will help them make decisions that impact their everyday lives.
These data will include GIS data such as roads, parcels, and political
boundaries and include imagery from satellites and aircrafts,
and landcover and landuse information built from this imagery.
The systems will enable the people of Kentucky to build computer
maps on the Internet in ground-breaking and unprecedented ways.
Through the Kentucky Virtual University (http://www.kyvu.org),
the project will also provide education and training to bring
the current workforce up-to-speed on the benefit and use of computer
mapping and digital imagery (remote sensing) to do their work.
The project will also 'hook together' computer mapping systems
across KY and the U.S. The project has been named the Kentucky
Landscape Census (KLC).
The KLC project
is a 3-year $4.3 million project. There were 258 respondents to
the NASA funding opportunity announcement and 41 awards. The project
will begin in the autumn of 2003 and will be complete in 2006.
According to Susan Carson Lambert, the Principal Investigator
for the project with the Governor's Office for Technology (GOT),
"The KLC project will be a huge benefit to the Commonwealth.
The sister project the Kentucky Landscape Snapshot (KLS) - has
already spawned numerous projects that are benefiting many sectors
of Kentucky government operations. There is not another project
like the KLC in the U.S.. The partners we have brought together
to do this work comprise a great team and the KLC will have far-reaching
implications for NASA and U.S. state and local governments."
The project
extends current work also funded by NASA at GOT, the Kentucky
Landscape Snapshot (KLS), (See: http://kls.ky.gov)
a $1.3 million project. While the KLS project is a 'snapshot'
in time of the landcover of the state, the KLC will create a data
distribution system and 'change detection maps'. This will show
how the landscape is changing, for example what farmland has become
urban or what forests have become grasslands. Providing information
in an easy to understand manner on how our landscape is changing
is important to citizens, elected officials, and governments,
so that they can make land management decisions based on up to
date and accurate information.
There are
three other partners who were jointly awarded the cooperative
agreement: the U.S. Geological Survey, Geographic Analysis and
Monitoring Program Reston, Virginia, Space Imaging, LLC, Thornton,
CO and the Open GIS Consortium, Wayland, MA.
For preliminary
information about the KLC project see: http://klc.ky.gov
For general information on the NASA awards and other winners see:
http://research.hq.nasa.gov/code_y/nra/current/CAN-02-OES-01/winners.html
For additional
information contact:
Susan Carson Lambert
(502) 502-573-1450
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