2017 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Measuring the Interdisciplinary Impact of Using Geospatial Data with Remote Sensing Data

Downs, Robert R.; Chen, Robert S.; Schumacher, Joachim A.

Various disciplines offer benefits to society by contributing to the scientific progress that informs the knowledge and decisions that improve the lives, safety, and conditions of people around the globe. In addition to disciplines within the natural sciences, other disciplines, including those in the social, health, and computer sciences, provide benefits to society by collecting, preparing, and analyzing data in the process of conducting research. Preparing geospatial environmental and socioeconomic data together with remote sensing data from satellite-based instruments for wider use by heterogeneous communities of users increases the potential impact of these data by enabling their use in different application areas and sectors of society. Furthermore, enabling wider use of scientific data can bring to bear resources and expertise that will improve reproducibility, quality, methodological transparency, interoperability, and improved understanding by diverse communities of users. In line with its commitment to open data, the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), which focuses on human interactions in the environment, curates and disseminates freely and publicly available geospatial data for use across many disciplines and societal benefit areas. We describe efforts to broaden the use of SEDAC data and to publicly document their impact, assess the interdisciplinary impact of the use of SEDAC data with remote sensing data, and characterize these impacts in terms of their influence across disciplines by analyzing citations of geospatial data with remote sensing data within scientific journals.