change is also being considered to trace the spread of oak blight in rural areas in the southern part of the state. Other possible uses of remote sensing are in watershed modeling, the siting of animal feeding operations, and understanding the impact of urban growth on agricultural areas.

Missouri also sees uses for remote sensing data in responding to natural hazards and unexpected events and estimating damages. The state faces potentially serious economic impacts from tornados and other extreme weather in both forested areas and urban settlements with extensive civil infrastructure. The nature of the damage can be estimated only if imagery obtained before the event is available to measure change after the event.

The state has a close relationship with state universities and often issues contracts for remote sensing data processing and analysis to groups in state universities. The flexibility of the contracts and the quality of the work at university research centers is a strong inducement to this practice, and it gives state officials access to advanced understandings and technologies in the field. However, relying on university scientists for significant remote sensing work under contract, instead of doing the work in state agencies, does mean that remote sensing activities are less visible to state managers and are therefore less secure.

Missouri, like Baltimore, also had the advantage of securing federal funds for its initial foray into remote sensing applications rather than having to use state funds for what would have been, in the context, an experimental methodology. The Missouri DNR has had a series of grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to delineate its wetlands. Initially, the state used Landsat data, although its more recent activities have been based on a combination of government and commercial remote sensing data, allowing state officials to compare the utility of each type of data for the wetlands task.

The steering committee was told that in Missouri, as in many other states, the initial uses of remote sensing were for new projects. The adoption of remote sensing data in Missouri differs in this way from the adoption of GIS, which was commonly employed throughout the state for numerous broad-scale uses. One of the implications of introducing a new technology into the public sector with project-specific applications is that other uses of the technology are often slow to emerge. As a result, in the case of remote sensing, there may be little coordination in the purchase or use of remote sensing data and technologies outside specific projects or agencies within the state. For example, when Missouri officials began to inventory the remote sensing data purchased by the state, they found that the same image had been purchased several times by different state

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Executive Summary (1-7)

1. Introduction (8-15)

2. Public Sector Applications of Remote Sensing Data (16-37)

3. Getting Started in Remote Sensing: Common Barriers and Bottlenecks (38-49)

4. Beyond State and Local Government (50-61)

5. Findings and Recommendations (62-70)

Appendix A: Transforming Remote Sensing Data into Information and Applications, Executive Summary (71-78)

Appendix B: Biographical Information on Steering Committee Members, Workshop Speakers, and Panelists (79-89)

Appendix C: Workshop Agenda and Participants (90-95)

Appendix D: Acronyms (96-97)