Colleagues:

NatureServe and USGS are co-organizing an NSF-funded workshop that is convening a broad cross section of fields – federal natural resource management and conservation agencies, academics, NGOs, private sector, citizen science leaders – to engage in a needs assessment for generating national biogeospatial data layers. This workshop, which has the lengthy title of "Promoting synergy in the innovative use of environmental data across academia, non-profits, local and state governments, industry and the Federal government," is intended to provide a big step forward in identifying regional, national, and continental scale spatial datasets on biodiversity, vegetation, climate, and environment to support cross jurisdictional decision making. It is being held in Washington, DC, this December 2-4, just 2 weeks from now.

We have commitments already from a broad and diverse set of leaders among the major federal agencies, so it will be a great relationship building opportunity as well. There are only a few spaces left, but if you would be available to come to DC to engage in these national scale data issues, we would be pleased to have your participation.

More info and the registration button can be found here: http://www.natureserve.org/news-events/events/promoting-synergy-innovative-u...

Very limited travel funding is still available for non-federal participants. Please email healy_hamilton@natureserve.org for details. Interested federal employees should contact Annie_Simpson@usgs.gov.

Best regards,

Healy Hamilton, NatureServe http://www.natureserve.org/ Chief Scientist Gerald (Stinger) Guala, Director of BISON http://bison.usgs.ornl.gov/ and ITIS http://www.itis.gov/, U.S. Geological Survey