USDA Puts GIS at Center of Reorganization By Kevin P. Corbley The US Department of Agriculture has named GIS implementation a top priority in a massive reorganization program aimed at streamlining operations and improving efficiency at thousands of county-level field offices across the nation. Referred to as the USDA Service Center Initiative, this multi-billion dollar program includes numerous modernization and re-engineering projects scheduled for completion by 2007. Already well underway is a conversion of 3,700 separate USDA offices into 2,550 one-stop Service Centers where departmental agencies can be housed under one roof. GIS will serve as the enabling technology for these centers to provide American farmers with quicker access to the agricultural, resource conservation, and rural development programs administered by the USDA. In coming years, each center will be equipped with GIS hardware and software, and digital geospatial data will replace many of the hardcopy aerial photographs used in mapping by the USDA for nearly 50 years. Activities related to the implementation of GIS technology and geospatial data are shared by two groups within the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA)-the Remote Sensing Section in Washington, D.C., and the Aerial Photography Field Office (APFO) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Last year, the Remote Sensing Section contracted MRJ Technology Solutions, Inc., a Fairfax, Virginia-based GIS services firm that plays multiple roles in the initiative, to establish a state-of-the-art GIS laboratory at USDA headquarters. The lab is used for hands-on software training, as well as development of digitization techniques and GIS applications tailored to Service Center requirements. APFO is spearheading the culture shift from hardcopy to digital maps. Since 1995, this office has been mosaicking digital orthorectified air photos to serve as the national base layer for the Service Center geospatial infrastructure. And in 1998, APFO began distributing these mosaics to contractors, such as MRJ, and to FSA pilot centers for digitization of field boundaries and common land units. "The maps and records that link farmers, their land, and USDA programs have traditionally been accumulated manually," says Glenn Bethel, chief of the FSA Remote Sensing Section. "GIS technology will replace much of the manual work, which will allow us to serve customers more quickly and share data among agencies." Serving America's Growers The Field Service Centers are the primary contact points between the USDA and American farmers. These centers directly manage programs related to farm credits, land conservation, subsidies, education, research, and disaster assistance. Since the reorganization, each center now includes offices for the Farm Service Agency, Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), and Rural Development Agency of the USDA. "If a grower wanted to sign up for a program [before the restructuring], he might have to visit FSA in one office and then go to NRCS at another location to fill out more forms," says Bethel. "And if he farmed land in two different counties, he would have to run back and forth between county offices." GIS will allow FSA, NRCS, and other agencies to transfer data and reduce redundancy in paperwork and record keeping. In addition, once the GIS is fully implemented and accessible via a centralized USDA server, a farmer from the Midwest can visit a Service Center while on vacation in Florida and get his paperwork done there. Abiding by current procedures, a grower sits down at the beginning of each season with a Service Center technician and identifies his fields on a large black-and-white aerial photo print. With the grower's assistance, the technician manually draws the boundaries of fields and farm tracts directly onto the prints. Various identification numbers are also written on the photos. The farmer then fills out form FSA-578, on which he identifies crops planted in each field and estimates of their acreage. The content of these forms is eventually entered into a central USDA database in Kansas City, Missouri. Field identification numbers serve as links between the database and the farm maps which remain at the Service Center. "Manually marking field boundaries is incredibly time consuming for both the Service Center staff and the producers... and estimating field acreage based on the hand-drawn boundaries can be inaccurate, which can lead to problems for the farmer," says Ronald Nicholls, Director of APFO, which supplies air photos to each center every 5 to 7 years. Digitizing Boundaries Key to GIS Success With the air photos playing such an important-yet manually intensive-role in center operations, digitization technology is being introduced with the GIS implementation as a primary means of improving efficiency. Under two separate contracts, the USDA has turned to MRJ Technology Solutions to assist in this phase of the program. MRJ is a well known provider of IT and geotechnology services within federal government circles and is now expanding into the commercial sector. As part of its technical services contract involving the new GIS lab, MRJ's Geospatial Systems Division in Virginia has been training FSA personnel in digitizing techniques. And as subcontractor to Database Terrain Mapping in Tucson, Arizona, MRJ's Geospatial Production Division has begun digitizing field boundaries for FSA. "MRJ divided the digitizing work with the prime contractor, Digital Terrain Mapping, and together we extracted field boundaries for six counties in less than 4 months," says Roseann Marsett, director of MRJ's Geospatial Production Division in Tucson. At the outset, MRJ received the original hardcopy photos from the county FSA offices and mosaicked digital orthoquads on CD from APFO. The GIS analyst's job involved displaying the orthoquad on screen in ArcView and then referring to the hardcopy to locate appropriate field boundaries. The analyst captured the outlines of individual farm tracts and fields and then collected field, tract, and highly erodable land surface identification numbers as attributes. "One challenge was that the orthophotos were more recent than the prints, which sometimes made them difficult to correlate," says David Schaub, an MRJ GIS analyst. "Sometimes we had to compare vegetation patterns elsewhere in the image to interpret where field boundaries were located." After the polygons had been digitized, the analyst converted the ArcView file to ARC/INFO so the data could be cleaned up in ARCEdit. This quality control step involved making sure polygons were closed and attributes had been assigned properly. Finally, the files were saved as ARC/INFO export documents. The total procedure of correlating prints with the digital quad, digitizing boundaries, and performing quality control averaged to one field completed every one and a half minutes. The number of fields in a county ranged from 5,000 to 20,000. "FSA performs its own quality assessment on the boundary files, and we are very pleased with the accuracy of the digitizing work completed so far," says Bethel. He adds that FSA is also conducting pilot digitizing programs at 12 Service Centers. The objective is to compare the costs of contracting out the digitizing work against completing it in-house. FSA expects to make a decision by next summer and says it may continue to split the work between contractors and centers so that digitizing can keep pace with delivery of new photography. The digital files will be stored in a national database with copies distributed on a county basis to each center for use in its office GIS. Ultimately, FSA plans to make the database accessible via a server so that any service center office can view field boundary files and related data from any county nationwide. Mosaics Facilitate Digitizing While the GIS transition takes place, APFO has faced the challenge of operating in both the digital and hardcopy world. It has continued to provide black-and-white prints to some counties while also preparing mosaics of digital orthorectified quadrangle air photos for the GIS implementation. "Aside from serving as the basemap for the GIS, the mosaics are crucial to the field boundary digitization program," says Kent Williams, APFO management analyst. "Digitizing from DOQ mosaics is more efficient than working from the individual DOQs." Williams explained that it can be very difficult to trace the boundaries of fields divided by the seams of the DOQs. Unless the photos have been digitally mosaicked, the photo edges may not match up precisely, resulting in inaccurate field boundary extraction. APFO technicians use Socet Set photogrammetric software from LH Systems to mosaic. In the first step, the technician assembles the four quarter quads that will be mosaicked into one 7.5-minute quad. The 12 images that adjoin the quarter quads are also referenced in this phase. The technician then overlaps the images on screen and begins selecting seam lines within the overlap region. Seams are seldom straight lines through the overlap. Rather, the technician chooses fence lines, drainage ditches, roads, or other features where edges can be matched very precisely. Seam lines are drawn in Socet Set along abutting edges of all 16 images. Next, a semi-automated dynamic range adjustment routine is applied to the 16 images to balance the color tone so they appear as one continuous image. "Tone balancing is very important because many contractors are used to acquire these air photos, which means there will be significant differences in appearance from one photo to another," says Williams. Finally, the images are stitched together at their new seams to form quads matching standard US Geological Survey quad maps. APFO stores three to four quads from the same county on a CD. These are sent either to the digitizing contractors or the pilot centers. Entering The Geospatial Era To prepare its personnel for the geospatial era, the USDA appointed one GIS coordinator from a Service Center in each state and contracted MRJ Technology Solutions to train them in GIS concepts and applications. "Training focused first on introducing the personnel to GIS basics, and later we performed sample projects in ArcView using an agriculture applications workbook developed by the USDA and ESRI," says David White, MRJ project manager for the USDA's technical services contract with the company. Most of the training took place in the new USDA GIS lab in Washington or at MRJ's Tucson office. Both locations are equipped with high-end NT platforms and several image processing and GIS software packages. White points out that although ArcView is being used in many pilot phases of the GIS implementation, the USDA has not chosen software products for installation in the 2,550 Service Centers. Nine pilot sites are engaged in a Business Re-engineering Program-a complete revamping of the way the USDA does business in its Service Centers. Many of these changes will follow directly from the new GIS applications now being developed at the lab in Washington. "This has been an exciting endeavor because we have been able to watch light bulbs go off in [USDA coordinators'] heads during the training as they realize new ways GIS will make their jobs more efficient," says White. "We hope to continue working with the USDA on both the training and digitization phases of the GIS implementation because it is a program that will benefit everyone." The USDA estimates the GIS and business re-engineering efforts will cut its database development and maintenance costs in half by 2001. And the overall Service Center initiative could reduce administrative expenditures for the county level field offices by the same margin a year or two later. About the Author: Kevin Corbley is a consultant and freelance writer specializing in the GeoTechnologies. He may be reached at [email protected] Back |