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About Us
Geography is a multidisciplinary science that emphasizes space and place. As such it offers great potential to integrate important environmental and societal processes to facilitate our understanding of how human well-being and environmental quality can be improved and maintained. Moreover, it has the potential to identify spatial variation in these characteristics and qualities and to facilitate a more "place-specific" solution to environmental problems, including reduction of risk and options for greater adaptation to an uncertain future. For example, integration of spatial data, indicators, and models from multiple disciplines will be critical in developing a set of spatial decision support tools to reduce multi-hazard risks (including secondary or ancillary impacts that can often be more catastrophic than initial impacts), to improve emergency response time, and to forecast potential vulnerabilities and risks of both people and important ecological goods and services to individual and multiple hazards.
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The ultimate goal or purpose of the Geography program in the USGS is "To improve people's ability to prosper by either affecting how the land will change (positive) or by becoming more adaptive to change (forecasting)." This will include giving decision makers and the public a combination of data and readily available tools (e.g., web-based) to improve and sustain environmental quality and public safety in an ever-changing world. These data and tools will result in an unprecedented ability to design landscapes that are resilient and adaptive.
Toward this goal, the Geography Discipline will become a global leader in the science of:
- integrated vulnerability and risk assessment that incorporate the natural, social, and economic sciences
- scenario-based, alternative futures tools to reduce environmental and hazard risks and to facilitate adaptation to an every-changing world at landscape scales
- land observations and monitoring via remote sensing
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