This cross-cutting proposal primarily is designed to focus on data management, decision systems, and geospatial visualization needs in support of the research efforts in agriculture, forestry and wildlife, and transportation. It will draw on current expertise and focus on land base modeling and visualization techniques. The needs assessment process for this cross-cutting area will be similar to those described for the three focus areas. However, in addition to supporting industry-identified research needs, this area will also work tightly with the three focus areas to support computational modeling and visualization tasks necessary for the successful completion of their core research projects. Advantages of focusing the RSTC's computational modeling research into one activity include:

Research projects will be developed through close collaboration with researchers in the focus areas and by active participation in user listening sessions. In addition, results from this cross-cutting research will serve as drivers to this area's goal to develop a virtual model of the remote sensing end-to-end information channel. This virtual model will be a tool to permit remote sensing technologists to assess the viability of newly developed decision systems in a virtual environment. This will offer substantial cost savings in tuning new algorithms to work over a wide variety of spectral and spatial resolutions before investing in field verification studies.