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GAP Named Winner of Major National Award

The national environmental nonprofit Renew America recently an-
nounced that the USGS Gap Analysis Program has been selected
for a National Award for Environmental Sustainability in the cat-
egory of Wildlife/Biodiversity. The prestigious awards are being
given by Renew America to 16 programs throughout the nation.

The National Awards for Environmental Sustainability honor com-
panies, communities, and individuals that are leading the change to
sustainability through their programs. Award winners were selected
from a pool of nearly 200 programs that have been recognized by
Renew America and the National Awards Council for Environmen-
tal Sustainability, a coalition of 60 leading businesses and environ-
mental and community groups. “These award winners represent
some of the ‘best of the best’ of this country’s environmental pro-
grams. They are shining examples of how citizens across America
can support our nation’s environmental and economic goals every
day,” said Anna Slafer, Executive Director of Renew America.

On April 17, 2000, Gap Analysis was honored at the Renew America
Awards Ceremony that helped kick off “Earth Week” in the nation’s
capital. Dana Reeve, actress and author of Care Packages: Letters
to Christopher Reeve from Strangers and Other Friends , hosted
this year’s Awards Ceremony.

John Mosesso, GAP Program Manager, commented that, “GAP is
providing resource managers and planners across the nation with
basic scientific information regarding the status of biodiversity
within their states. … Good information allows good decisions that
help keep common species common.”

The winners were selected by representatives of the National Awards
Council for Environmental Sustainability (NACES). Coordinated
by Renew America, NACES comprises 60 national environmental,
nonprofit, government, and business organizations, including the
National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy, The Humane
Society of the United States, AT&T, U.S. EPA, the National Geo-
graphic Society, and the Smithsonian Institution.

The Gap Analysis Program will be listed and described along with
this year’s finalists in Renew America’s Environmental Success
Index, a comprehensive database of more than 1,400 successful
environmental programs throughout the United States. It is avail-
able free on the World Wide Web (www.crest.org/renew_america).

New Staff at National GAP Office

Ree Brannon is our new GIS Analyst in the National GAP office.
She comes to us with a background in natural resources, GIS, and
remote sensing. Ree’s undergraduate background is in biology and range management. She received a master’s degree in Forestry from
West Virginia University, while she worked on the initial land cover
mapping efforts for WV-GAP. Her 15 years in the Forest Service
gave her experience in natural resource management, planning, and
research. Now, for GAP, her responsibilities include doing quality
assurance for the GIS data during project closeout, preparing the
GIS data for CD publication and Web serving, and eventually (once
we catch up on the backlog of state projects) merging the data for
regional assessments and pursuing more applications for GAP data.
If you have questions on GIS data standards or would like to share
your experiences in any of these areas, contact her at (208) 885-
3720 or by e-mail (abrannon@uidaho.edu).

GIS Data Delivery

To facilitate the quality assurance process for delivery of GAP GIS
data, Ree Brannon developed a directory structure and an example
checklist for the layers, which are posted in the Standards section
of the Handbook (http://www.gap.uidaho.edu/handbook/Standards).
As she reviews state projects, this structure may be modified. The
Standards section will undergo a major review for consistency.

We still require data delivery on CDs, and the directory structure
allows you to organize your CDs. Some general comments from
experience working with states that have submitted final projects:

• Try to keep all of one theme together on one CD (for example,
all land cover layers). Your vertebrate grids will be the largest
bundle of data, if they don’t all fit on one CD, divide by major
taxonomic groups (e.g., birds on one CD, mammals and herps
on another).

• The organization for metadata may seem redundant. Each data
layer must be accompanied by its metadata (the *.html file) in
the same directory. Plus, you must include copies of all metadata
in the directory called meta_master. The Standards will be ed-
ited to require three forms of metadata (*.txt, *.html, and *.sgml).
These are readily created in MetaMaker. For BRD units, this is
business as usual (as Executive Order 12906 has been on the
books since 1994). For others, it is important to understand that
any generation of spatial data done with federal dollars requires
metadata. The redundancy in format is to provide one file for
error checking (*.txt), one for presentation on the Internet
(*.html), and one for indexing elements for the spatial data clear-
inghouse (*.sgml). Remember, metadata describe the evolu-
tion of the spatial data set being documented. If there are com-
panion files to the GIS data (reports, spreadsheet, another GIS
layer), use metadata to reference them.

• The standards and directory structure were created to expedite
product review and to simplify future regionalization activities.
If you do not follow these guidelines (by changing names or
merging data files), this may result in delays or requests to re-
submit the data. Whereas metadata describe the legacy and de-
velopment of a spatial data set, use READMEs to describe the
files in one directory. This helps if a user needs to know what
codes mean in a grid or coverage, or a crosswalk for species
grids names and common/scientific names of the species.

Ree Brannon
National Gap Analysis Program, Moscow, Idaho