No one would run a business without accounting for its capital outlays. Yet most companies overlook one major capital component--the value of the earth's ecosystem services. It is a staggering omission; recent calculations place the value of the earth's total ecosystem services--water storage, atmosphere regulation, climate control, and so on--at $33 trillion a year. Not accounting for those co...

The National Map is the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) next-generation topographic mapping product. This concept aims to achieve a more effective and regenerative public mapping program through local participation, inter-agency data sharing, and integration. This ambitious endeavor faces many significant challenges to its implementation, however. The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) wa...

With the advent of faster, cheaper planetary missions, the coming decade promises a significant growth in the number of missions that will be simultaneously supported by NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN). In addition, new types of missions will stretch our deep space communications capabilities. Ambitious outer planet missions, with extremely tenuous communications links due to their great distan...