Mason scientist to host, maintain and enhance online geospatial applications

Liping Di, Director and Professor, Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS),received funding for a project in which he is hosting, maintaining, and enhancing the National Agricultural Statistics Service's (NASS) operational online geospatial applications Crop-CASMA and VegScape systems. 

Crop-CASMA is a web-based interactive map visualization, dissemination, and querying system for U.S. crop-specific land cover data layers created annually for the continental United States using moderate resolution satellite imagery and extensive agricultural ground truthing.  

VegScape, the U.S. National Vegetation Condition Monitoring System, is a remote sensing data-driven, web service-based, geospatially enabled online system. 

The near-real-time information provided by the two systems is vital for agricultural and food security decision making in the US and the world. 

Di received the initial funding of $40,000 for the first year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of this award. The performance period of the award is from Sept. 2022 to Aug. 2027.