The AZGS Geoinformatics team’s mission is to design, develop, and deploy cutting-edge computer resources for Geosciences research and education. Some of these resources are meant to support AZGS and other scientists in their research by providing reliable workflows for managing their data. Other products are designed for consumers of geosciences data such as educators, students, businesses, policymakers, or the public at large.
The team currently maintains or develops several noteworthy geoinformatics tools:
- The Geomapmaker toolbar is an extension to the ESRI ArcGIS Pro environment mean to support AZGS staff mapping efforts
- The Paleobiology Database is a 25-year old international database of fossil occurrences used in 1000s of publications in paleontology and ecology
- The National Geothermal Data System is a catalog of tens of thousands of photos, maps, reports, letters, and other geologic exploration materials from across the United States
- The AZGS mining information website is a collections of 1000s of historical photographs, reports, and letters pertaining to the history of Arizona mining
- A variety of smaller tools such as its Natural Hazards, Subsurface, Stratigraphy, and Igneous Geochemistry viewers
Several of these tools are hosted on the AZGS Webtools website.
Our ongoing, long-term tasks include:
- Uploading AZGS publications to our AZGS online repository, the University of Arizona campus repository, and the US Geological Survey National Geologic Map Database (NGMDB)
- Creating aesthetic and accurate digital geologic maps, alongside our geologists; for example, the image on the right shows a before and after comparison of an original black-and-white PDF scan and its new form as a digitally preserved geodatabase
- Data curation efforts that keep our archives and repositories up to date and accessible to the public
We are responsible for assisting you with any publications you may wish to submit to AZGS! If you are interested in publishing with us and having your document hosted on our repositories, please contact Ellie Broadman (ebroadman@arizona.edu)