Surveying, Mapping and GIS

Posting live from EPA's Environmental Symposium in St. Louis - One of the things that's being discussed there is a challenge put forth by Bill Ruckelshaus, former EPA Administrator, who is now heading up the Puget Sound Initiative, to clean up this natural resource that forms a big part of Northwest Washington State.

As part of this, they established a wiki, and are having mashup camps to rapidly get as much content relating to Puget Sound and its' environment as possible:

In a few short hours, I was able to develop a Virtual Earth mashup, which performs MetaCarta searches against EPA and other federal and state documents, pulls in EPA Toxic Release Inventory for Washington State as a KML layer, WMS layers for USGS Wetlands and Land Cover (NLCD), as well as NHD layers showing streams and impaired waters.



There is also a great OpenLayers-based mashup builder and other tools - anyone interested in improving the environment in the Puget Sound area will be encouraged to participate as things move forward.

I also built a standalone version here: http://www.synergist-tech.com/Demo1/PugetSound.html