USGS Multimedia Gallery: (Video)--Remarks on the National Geospatial Program

MS: Good morning—good afternoon, everyone. I’m so delighted to be here with you today and part of this celebration. It really is a treat. And I’m very proud to represent the Department of the Interior and especially our secretary, Ken Salazar. Serving as the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science has given me an unparalleled opportunity to help the Obama administration and the secretary move forward to bring sound science to our policy and decision-making in ways that our country really urgently needs. I’m very pleased and honored today to be in the presence of all these mapping professionals and the retirees who were introduced and those other retirees in the audience who have helped make this national mapping program possible.

I salute your service, all of you, and I thank you for it. And please know that Secretary Salazar appreciates your efforts as well. And as Bob said, I owe you a personal thanks, because I have used many, many times your USGS topographic 7.5 minute quadrangle maps. I use them for backpacking in the Rocky Mountains and I use them to decorate my office in Denver, Colorado, where I was practicing law. My personal decorating scheme was to use the USGS quad maps instead of pictures because they were cheaper. And the first thing I always did when I opened a new case file was to order the USGS quad maps so that I could really get the lay of the land.

So I want to thank you personally for that. Over the time that I’ve been using the USGS topo maps, they’ve gotten better, more detailed, more up to date, and more accessible, than ever before. In the past quarter century, digital technologies have really transformed topographic mapping science, and that has enabled the USGS to construct the electronic national map that we have today. To celebrate our legacy of 125 years of topographic mapping, as was mentioned, we are today announcing a new type of digital topographic map that can be printed by users, and a new online viewer system.

And you’ll be hearing more about both of those in today’s program. We’re going to learn a lot more about the 125 year legacy of the USGS mapping program, and we’ll see first-hand these new products that represent great strides in mapping technology. As the first speaker to you this afternoon, I have the opportunity to frame our celebration, and I’d like to broaden our discussion a bit. I want to talk to you for just a few minutes about the benefits that a national mapping program brings to our country. We often hear, and we’ll hear today, that a comprehensive national mapping system is very important, it’s vitally important.

And of course we all know that’s right. But maps aren’t just important for their own sake. Geographic information and maps are tools that enable us to do other tasks, like build highways, carry out a census, search for minerals, search for lost people, protect lands with cultural and environmental significance, or simply hike to a hidden lake, and in my case, get yourself back out again. As the nation’s lead mapping organization, a fundamental duty for the US Geological Survey has been, and continues to be, ensuring the availability of complete, consistent, and current based geographic information.

And that base informational framework, whether it’s in the form of paper maps or electronic data, that provides a common starting point of geographic knowledge that’s used by government, by industry, and the general public. Sound geographic knowledge has always been a basic requirement for an effective government. That was recognized by the Continental Congress back in 1781. That Congress appointed a geographer of the United States, even before the Revolutionary War had ended. President Thomas Jefferson recognized this need, too, when, in the early days of our country, he instructed the Lewis and Clarke expedition to begin to find and to carefully map a river route to the Pacific.

When that expedition’s accomplishments were published, they were published in a map of the track of the expedition in 1814 in Philadelphia, and that was really our first national map. John Wesley Powell, who was the second director of the USGS, he recognized the need for base mapping information when he asked Congress in 1884 to authorize a comprehensive national mapping program, and they did so, on December 5th, 1884, 125 years ago. That’s what we’re here celebrating today. Following in step with modern advances in cartographic and computer technologies, and with the evolution of John Wesley Powell’s vision, today’s national map is an electronic compilation of multiple layers of geographic data.

And those layers and the data within them are provided by many different partners. The layers include highways and streams and rivers and cities and land use and crop cover and ownership and taxing districts. And the list can go on and on. But the nationally standardized base framework of geographic data, that’s what makes it possible for all the layered information to be utilized. And it also makes it possible for scientists to discover relationships between phenomena and processes that would otherwise appear totally independent.

When our USGS geographic information is enhanced through private enterprise, it forms the basis for a huge number of commercial products. The navigation services and the electronic mapping that we see on the internet, those are based on USGS base mapping. And the personal navigation devices that many of us have in our cars that are saviors in a new city, those are also based on this geographic framework. Emergency management and response across the nation is strengthened through widely available and nationally consistent geographic information and technology.

Having that information at our fingertips facilitates rapid response, good communication, and improves decision making in times of crisis like earthquakes or hurricanes or even acts of terrorism. And there’s one further important benefit to a national mapping program that can’t really be described as scientific. But John Wesley Powell wasn’t just a man of science and a geographer and a geologist. He was also a humanist, and he was interested in ethnography and languages, and he appreciated native cultures. He would have appreciated the fact that the detailed picture of the nation that a comprehensive national map provides enables every American to have a shared perspective and a common geographic vocabulary.

These are important things that bind us together in ways that we hardly even realize. Again, I’m so pleased to be here with you today for this wonderful celebration. And I’m honored to work with all of you that have made this national program of topographic maps possible. I thank you for your contributions. You should be very proud. Thank you. [applause]