Richmond Hill, Ontario, September 21, 2005 – PCI Geomatics® is pleased to donate its flagship geospatial software suite, Geomatica®, to the scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center. Geomatica will be used to assist in the production of a high-resolution National Biomass and Carbon Dataset for the year 2000 (NBCD2000), the first-ever inventory of its kind. Through a combination of 2000 Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), topographic survey, land-use, land-cover, and extensive forest inventory data sets collected by the U.S. Forest Service, this dataset will serve as an invaluable baseline for carbon stock assessment and flux modeling in the United States. Geomatica will be instrumental in facilitating the successful development of this project.
The NBCD2000 project, funded by NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program, combines vegetation canopy heights derived from digital elevation data collected during the 2000 SRTM. The mission mapped 80 percent of the Earth’s land mass with a radar instrument, producing the most complete digital surface map of Earth. In combination with the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) and National Elevation Datasets (NED), a high-resolution database of circa-2000 vegetation canopy heights, aboveground biomass, and carbon stocks for the continental United States is generated, providing an unprecedented baseline against which to compare data products from the next generation of advanced Earth observing, remote sensing platforms.
“PCI Geomatics is pleased to donate Geomatica to the NBCD2000 project, as it proves to be the foundation for future studies. Carbon stock data sets are vital to determining the impact on climate change from both natural and man-made occurring events,” says Cary Lichtman, an account executive at PCI Geomatics. “Geomatica’s ability to handle large quantities of high-resolution, multi-formatted data efficiently and accurately is ideal for this ground-breaking research.”
Geomatica will be used for the integration and visualization of raster data sets in various formats through our Generic Database (GDB) technology in Geomatica Focus. Geomatica OrthoEngine will streamline the processes of data mosaicking and reprojection. The advanced Geomatica image analysis and modeling tools are at the core of building the raster data processing models to generate the final data sets. Given the national scope of the project, PCI technology is well suited to handle batch processing requirements through the EASI programming environment.
“The National Biomass and Carbon Dataset 2000 project is based on the integration of large multi-source data sets, including radar and optical satellite data, and thematic GIS layers,” says Dr. Josef Kellndorfer, an associate scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center. “PCI Geomatica technology is instrumental to support the data integration of these large continental-scale data sets with respect to cartographic data set reprojection and data resampling, and also provides the scientific analysis tools to deal with the data fusion and analysis aspects of the various data resources. Geomatica software allows for efficient handling of such complex tasks.”
For more information about PCI Geomatics, visit our Web site at www.pcigeomatics.com.
For more information about the Woods Hole Research Center, visit www.whrc.org.
About PCI Geomatics
PCI Geomatics is a world-leading developer of image-centric geomatics software solutions. The PCI Geomatics flagship software, Geomatica, meets the growing demands of the remote sensing, GIS, cartography, and photogrammetry worlds. PCI Geomatics is celebrating the beginning of its third decade as an industry-leading geomatics solution provider, and has long been recognized for offering high-value geomatics software solutions, advanced algorithms, excellent customer assistance, and product support for the widest range of spatial data formats in the industry.
About the Woods Hole Research Center
The Woods Hole Research Center is dedicated to science, education, and public policy for a habitable Earth, seeking to conserve and sustain forests, soils, water, and energy by demonstrating their value to human health and economic prosperity. The center sponsors initiatives in the Amazon, the Arctic, Africa, Russia, North America, the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and Cape Cod. Center programs focus on the carbon cycle, forest function, land cover/land use, water cycles and chemicals in the environment, science in public affairs, and education, providing primary data and enabling better appraisals of the trends in forests that influence their role in the global carbon budget.