Remote sensing and GIS for regional environmental applications

Virginia Access (VAccess) is a regional, remote sensing and Geographical Information Sciences project among several educational institutions. It is a prototype for regional projects in other states and other countries, and is funded by NASA's applications program. The user communities VAccess serves are the Commonwealth of Virginia and State of Maryland, local and regional users represented in a Technical Advisory Committee. Remote sensing data include global NASA and NOAA data tailored for regional applications as well as high-resolution multispectral (Landsat, MODIS, etc.), hyperspectral, LIDAR and SAR data sets. Broad beam LIDAR technology can provide canopy structure as well as other information for environmental concerns such as the state of wetlands. The data information system is based on a distributed architecture to serve remote sensing and GIS data to a variety of users via the WWW. Several remote sensing and GIS-based environmental and Earth systems science applications projects are discussed here, including flood and fire hazard mitigation, forestry, land use/land cover and epidemiology projects; as well as innovative data fusion, data access and analysis and various tools serving the users and their applications.