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How remote sensing data from the NASA Earth observation satellites can be used in conjunction with socioeconomic data to improve assessment of urbanization patterns and trends was one of two main topics addressed in a technical interchange meeting organized by SEDAC, the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center operated by CIESIN, May 8–9 in Washington, D.C. The second topic was the potential role of NASA data centers like SEDAC in supporting the development of a system of indicators for the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), a Congressionally-mandated assessment of climate change and its impacts in the United States.

As part of the meeting, two parallel breakout sessions were held with members from the SEDAC User Working Group (UWG) and the UWG of the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), to take advantage of their combined expertise and understanding of remote sensing and socioeconomic data. Experts from NASA, the NCA, other NASA data centers, and the World Bank also participated in person and by teleconference. Later in the meeting, SEDAC manager Robert Chen, deputy manager Alex de Sherbinin, and lead project scientist Marc Levy briefed the SEDAC UWG on recent activities and progress, including improvements to the SEDAC Web site and the expanding range of scientific citations of SEDAC data.

The SEDAC UWG is chaired by Molly Macauley of Resources for the Future. The UWG provides strategic advice and guidance to SEDAC and NASA and reviews SEDAC data development and dissemination plans.

CIESIN senior digital archivist Robert Downs created seven modules for the online learning resource, Data Management for Scientists Short Course, which was developed as a collaborative effort of the ESIP Commons, the knowledge repository of the Federation of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). The short course aims to improve data management practices of scientists and data management professionals. Modules developed by Downs include Providing Access to Your Data: Access Mechanisms,” “Providing Access to Your Data: Determining Your Audience,” “Providing Access to Your Data: Rights,” “Responsible Data Use: Data Restrictions,” “Working with Your Archive: Broadening Your User Community,” “Providing Access to Your Data: Tracking Data Usage,” and  “Providing Access to Your Data: Handling Sensitive Data.” All of the modules in the short course are freely available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and may be used individually or combined to support instruction and learning on data management, dissemination, stewardship, and related issues.

CIESIN staff members participated in two recent scientific conferences, the annual meetings of the Population Association of America (PAA) and the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Associate research scientist  Susana Adamo organized two sessions at the PAA, held in New Orleans April 11–13. The first session, in which she served as the discussant, focused on urbanization and climate change. Presenters included former CIESIN scientist Deborah Balk of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. The second session, which Adamo chaired, addressed the demographic dimensions of climate change and included presenters from the U.S., Burkina Faso, and Ghana. More than 2,000 demographers, sociologists, economists, public health professionals, and other population experts attended the conference.

At the AAG annual meeting in Los Angeles April 9–13, geographic information specialist Tricia Chai-Onn staffed the NASA booth, helping to increase awareness and understanding of NASA Earth science data and services, including those offered by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN. The AAG meeting attracts more than 5,000 geographers, Geographic Information System specialists, environmental scientists, and other scholars from around the world, providing an excellent opportunity to interact directly with SEDAC users.

CIESIN welcomed three interns April 16 from the École Polytechnique in Paris: Guillem Bardy, Juliette Mansard, and Sarah Le Net. Bardy is majoring in environmental sciences and is working with senior research associate Alex de Sherbinin to study flood resilience in New York City, Mumbai, and Ho Chi Minh City. Mansard, also an environmental sciences major, is working with associate director for geospatial applications, Mark Becker, on a new project to develop a decision support system on flood hazards for the lower Hudson River Valley. Le Net is majoring in renewable energies and civil engineering and is collaborating with information scientist Xiaoshi Xing to retrieve and analyze sulphur dioxide emissions data by region and by country for the period 1850 to 1969. All three interns are third-year students enrolled in a four-year program at École Polytechnique that leads to the equivalent of a U.S. masters degree. This is the sixth year that CIESIN has hosted three-month internships arranged through the Alliance program, a joint venture between Columbia University, École Polytechnique, Sciences Po, and the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

SEDAC has a long history of disseminating sustainability indicator data, including the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), and the Compendium of Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESIC). These indicators have generally been developed in a partnership between CIESIN and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP). Now, in a new report, CIESIN and YCELP assess the use of indicators in policy and management contexts. The report, Indicators in Practice: How Environmental Indicators Are Being Used in Policy and Management Contexts, identifies three potential applications for indicators: use by policymakers to help choose a course of action; broad, conceptual use of indicators to frame an issue for society; and a political role in helping make a case for or against a particular policy action.

CIESIN senior research associate Alex de Sherbinin was lead author of the report, written with deputy director Marc Levy and researchers Aaron Reuben and Laura Johnson from YCELP and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The study will continue to track the evolving uses and impacts of environmental indicators, adding new case studies as they are produced to the Indicator Case Studies Web site.

CIESIN deputy director Marc Levy and associate research scientist Susana Adamo participated in an Expert Group Meeting (EGM) on Science and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) held March 20-21 at United Nations headquarters in New York City. Adamo chaired a portion of the meeting, and Levy served as rapporteur for one of the two break-out groups. Organized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) in partnership with the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), the purpose of the meeting was to assess how science can best inform the SDG process and provide guidance to the Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG). The OWG is a body of the UN General Assembly charged with developing proposals for the SDGs, which are expected to guide international development efforts after 2015.

CIESIN is pleased to welcome Erin Doxsey-Whitfield and Gina Dinnegan as staff members and Jared Talkin as an intern. Doxsey-Whitfield is now a senior research staff assistant in the Geospatial Applications Division, after working at CIESIN last year as a casual employee. She received a M.S. in physical geography from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where her research focused on glacial biogeochemistry and alpine water quality. Dinnegan has joined CIESIN's administrative team as a part-time administrative assistant. She had been a teacher’s assistant at St. Dominic’s School in Blauvelt, New York, working with special education students. Talkin is majoring in sustainable development at Columbia's School of General Studies and is a senior editor of Consilience, The Journal of Sustainable Development, hosted by the Columbia Libraries. At CIESIN, he is working on the fourth version of the Gridded Population of the World data product.

CIESIN moved to the Lamont Campus of Columbia University in Palisades, New York, in July 1998, becoming a center in the newly established Earth Institute along with the International Research Institute on Climate and Society (IRI).

In late 1992, I received a call from a head hunter who was seeking suggestions for a senior scientist with a non-profit organization that had an odd acronym and long name: CIESIN, the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network, based in Saginaw, Michigan. Although not senior myself, I thought I had a lot of the desired interdisciplinary expertise and experience already—in part from working with geographer Bob Kates as an assistant professor with the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University—so I applied for the position. After a short period working as a consultant, I began at CIESIN fulltime in March 1993, the same month that Dr. Roberta Balstad Miller took over as CIESIN’s second president.

The Science Division I joined was directed by the late Jack Eddy, a noted space scientist with whom I had worked on a National Research Council study for the International-Geosphere Biosphere Program. In the first few years, we had the opportunity to launch some exciting new activities, including a Global Demography Project proposed by distinguished geographer Waldo Tobler and some innovative online data resources such as the Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators (ENTRI) database and the China Dimensions data collection. With the Internet and the World Wide Web still in their early stages, CIESIN was ahead of the curve in bringing new data and information technologies to bear on interdisciplinary problems involving both the natural and social sciences. Full Story

CIESIN senior digital archivist Robert Downs participated in the EarthCube Education End-User Workshop, which was held at the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography March 4–6. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the workshop focused on tools and capabilities for improving undergraduate education in the Earth and environmental sciences. It included scientist-educators, data providers, and employers. Downs gave a presentation highlighting interdisciplinary uses of SEDAC data and he served as a facilitator of a breakout session on Interface Design. EarthCube is a collaborative endeavor between NSF and the community of geoscientists and cyberscientists to transform research and data management practices and provide new access and visualization capabilities to the geosciences community over the next decade.

The Transboundary Waters Assessment Programme (TWAP) River Basins kickoff workshop took place March 4–5 in Copenhagen, with CIESIN senior research associate Alex de Sherbinin presenting a summary of the SEDAC data sets relevant to the assessment. Funded by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), TWAP is an indicator-based global assessment of all transboundary freshwater and marine systems, including physical, socioeconomic, and governance aspects. CIESIN's primary role is to develop socioeconomic indicators based on a range of data sets for approximately 260 transboundary river basins globally.

CIESIN director Robert Chen participated in a working meeting hosted February 11–12 in Brussels by the European Commission and organized by the Data Sharing Working Group (DSWG) of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The DSWG is the focal point within GEO for implementation of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) Data Sharing Principles, and in particular the Data Sharing Action Plan approved at the 2010 GEO Ministerial Summit. Chen is one of the DSWG co-chairs, representing the International Council for Science, a GEO Participating Organization. He is also co-leading a new DSWG subgroup focused on encouraging more open data sharing environments and building capacity for data sharing at the national level. The working meeting included co-chairs and representatives from a number of GEO Members including the European Commission, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

A unique source of interdisciplinary data on people and the environment is the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), operated by CIESIN as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). SEDAC works to enhance the value of NASA’s remote sensing data and information by disseminating complementary socioeconomic and environmental data and creating value-added integrated data products and services, including a wide variety of ready-to-use maps and mapping tools.

With more than 40,000 unique visitors per month on average, SEDAC’s Web site provides a central access point for SEDAC data, information, tools, and other resources. A major redesign over the past year has greatly streamlined the user interface and improved access to SEDAC’s diverse holdings of spatial and other data and associated documentation. The most recent release includes a major upgrade to the search interface for SEDAC’s map collection, which contains more than 2,000 pre-formatted maps, all available openly under a Creative Commons-Attribution Only license. The Web site has also been improved in response to a recent usability review conducted by a leading user experience research firm commissioned by NASA.

SEDAC’s data, which cover topics ranging from population distribution to natural disaster risk to environmental sustainability, are available to users for free via direct download and in many cases via database queries or map services compliant with open standards. SEDAC also provides users with assistance by e-mail or telephone, as well as examples of the use of SEDAC data in research and real-world applications. Feedback on the new Web site and on SEDAC’s holdings may be submitted online.

CIESIN senior research associate Alex de Sherbinin travelled to Goa and Mumbai, India recently for talks and meetings on climate vulnerability and adaptation and on data management and integration. On January 25 he gave a presentation on “Climate Change Vulnerability & Adaptation at the Urban Scale: Spatial Knowledge and Policy Research” to the Goa Town and County Planning Association. For a data management workshop associated with the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER) program on January 27, he presented “Social science data management and data integration for global change research.” The workshop was held at India’s National Institute of Oceanography in Goa. From January 29–February 1, de Sherbinin served as visiting scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-Bombay) in Mumbai. There he gave talks on climate vulnerability and adaptation and on the integration of remote sensing and social science data. He also held meetings with IIT-Bombay colleagues and city officials related to planned research on flood vulnerability in Mumbai.

CIESIN deputy director Marc Levy participated in a series of meetings in Tokyo, on the occasion of the Earth Systems Governance conference held at United Nations University headquarters. On January 28 he helped lead a workshop on governance and climate change scenarios, under the auspices of the Joint IAV-IAM Committee on Development and Use of Socio-Economic Scenarios and the Earth System Governance Project. The workshop provided an opportunity to critically evaluate the role of governance in climate scenarios. Levy also gave a “semi-plenary” talk on this topic at the conference, on January 30. Finally, he participated in the launch of a project on Governance and the Sustainable Development Goals, to be carried out under the joint auspices of the UN University and the Earth Systems Governance Project with financial support by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment.

SEDAC’s main Web site is expected to have reduced functionality beginning Friday, January 18, due to a planned upgrade of the electrical system for the Geoscience Building, which houses SEDAC’s main computer facilities at the Lamont campus of Columbia University. The power shutdown is expected to last until Sunday, January 20. Some SEDAC services will be operated from another location on campus, and SEDAC expects to return services to normal operation late on Monday, January 21, which is the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in the U.S. when Columbia University is normally closed.

CIESIN’s offices will be closed beginning at noon on Friday. However, many staff members will be working from other locations and accessible via electronic mail. Any urgent requests should be sent to CIESIN User Services at ciesin.info@ciesin.columbia.edu. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Data Center Services manager John Scialdone and senior digital archivist Robert Downs represented the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) at the 2013 Winter Meeting of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), held January 8–10 in Washington DC. Downs co-organized the Open Source Cluster Breakout on January 8 with Chris Mattmann of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and presented “Highlights of the Earth Science Data System (ESDS) Software Reuse Working Group” during this session. He also presented the poster, “Improving Open Scientific Data Practices: Lessons from Open Source Software.” Scialdone was re-elected as chair the ESIP Federation Partnership Committee, whose function is to review and approve organizations applying for membership, and Downs was re-appointed as a member of the Ontology Governance Group for the ESIP Semantic Web Cluster. The winter meeting focused on the theme, “Advancing Earth Science Information: From Climate Assessment to Intelligence to Action.”

Twelve new articles on the use of NASA remote sensing data and information in Earth science research are featured in the 2012 version of Sensing Our Planet, an annual collection prepared by the National Snow and Ice Data Center on behalf of the NASA Earth Observing Data and Information System (EOSDIS). The articles highlight a wide variety of natural and social science research activities enabled by access to Earth observations and related data from EOSDIS. In one article, former CIESIN staff member Adam Storeygard, now an assistant professor of economics at Tufts University, discusses his use of night-time lights and population data to better estimate economic activity around the world over recent decades. He and his colleagues Vernon Henderson and David Weil from Brown University obtained the data from the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) in Boulder and the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN. The 2012 collection is available for free, both in print and online.

A new book on Environmental Tracking for Public Health Surveillance has been released as part of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Book Series published by CRC Press. Edited by Stanley A. Morain and Ameilia M. Budge of the University of New Mexico, the volume includes a range of papers on the use of Earth observations and other geospatial environmental and socioeconomic data in public health applications. CIESIN senior research associate Meredith Golden and director Robert Chen contributed to a chapter, “Data discovery, access and retrieval,” prepared by Steve Kempler of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. This chapter highlights the many data resources and services relevant to public health available from a variety of sources, including the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) and the Columbia Superfund Research Program Web site, both operated by CIESIN. The volume is the 11th in the ISPRS Book Series, which began in 2004.

Two new papers focusing on issues related to vulnerability to environmental change were co-authored by CIESIN staff. Associate research scientist Susana Adamo and senior research associate Alex de Sherbinin are co-authors (with former staff member Liana Razafindrazay) of the article, “Áreas de Alta Vulnerabilidad Ambiental en América Latina y el Caribe: Una Perspectiva Regional a Escala Subnacional” (Areas of High Environmental Vulnerability in Latin America and the Caribbean: A Regional Perspective at the Subnational Level), appearing in Notas de Población. The paper integrates data on population distribution, poverty, and hazards from the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by CIESIN. Alex de Sherbinin is also a co-author of the article, “Transition Towards a New Global Change Science: Requirements for Methodologies, Methods, Data and Knowledge,” appearing in the journal Environmental Science & Policy. The paper addresses gaps in progress on the part of the scientific community in dealing with the challenges of global change, and calls for innovation in methodologies, knowledge, and data towards building solutions. It is an outcome of the European Science Foundation’s Forward Look activity, ‘‘Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable Earth (RESCUE),’’ Working Group 3 on Requirements for Research Methodologies and Data.

Robert Downs, senior digital archivist at CIESIN, has been honored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) with the designation of ACM Senior Member. ACM Senior Membership recognizes individuals with a minimum of 10 years of professional experience who have distinguished themselves through technical leadership and technical or professional contributions. There were 117 recipients in 2012.

Downs, who has a PhD in information management from the Stevens Institute of Technology, conducts research on the development and use of data and information systems and coordinates CIESIN digital data archiving activities including operation of the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). He is a scientific member of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Columbia University, currently serving a second term as vice-chair of the Morningside campus IRB. Downs has also contributed to the development and evaluation of ISO 16363, the international standard for the audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories. He is active in a number of different community initiatives, including the NASA Earth Science Data System Working Groups, the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, the National Science Foundation EarthCube initiative, and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance.