The Geography Department of California State University Long Beach (CSULB) will establish a center for the Integration and Management of Applications and Geospatial Education (IMAGE) as a mechanism for integrating the existing research, application, and education activities of the Department and its partners. These activities will be expanded to include a broader range of geospatial applications research with a commensurate increase in opportunities for graduate and undergraduate research experiences. IMAGE will integrate the activities of a NASA Regional Earth Science Applications Center (RESAC), two universities (CSULB and UC Santa Barbara), and a NASA Center (JPL) with a NASA - California State University (CSU) Education Collaborative designed to support the largest university system in the United States (23 campuses- 407,000 students) in the recruitment and training of the next generation Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Geography (STEM/Geography) related workforce.

Currently, the primary geospatial application focus of CSULB Geography is the Southern California Wildfire Hazard Center (SCWHC). The SCWHC is one of seven Regional Earth Science Applications Centers established by NASA in 1999 and the only RESAC housed at a non-Ph.D. granting institution. The Center was founded as a collaborative effort between CSULB, the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Aerospace Corporation, and the Los Angeles County Fire Department. The goal of the Center is to provide spatially continuous fire risk information, derived from orbital and airborne sensors, combined with field and map data. This information is analyzed in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment to generate products that can be used as general planning and fire hazard prediction tools as well as inputs to fire behavior models and insurance company rating formulas and delivered to the user community in applications specific formats. To support the creation and delivery of these products by UCSB scientists, undergraduate interns at CSULB have collected and analyzed vegetation samples to determine live fuel moisture content. In addition, these same interns have prepared remote sensing imagery for further analysis by UCSB and Aerospace. Currently a wide variety of first generation products are available at both the UCSB and Aerospace SCWHC web-sites.

The goals of IMAGE are to: (1) Continue to develop the integrated science (hyperspectral and interferometric SAR), applications (mesocale weather modeling, fuels maps and fire modeling), and education (research experiences for undergraduates) components of the SCWHC; (2) Expand the activities of the RESAC beyond the specific focus of the SCWHC to include applications and education based on new relationships with San Dimas Experimental Forest and Crystal Cove State Park; (3) Integrate the current and expanded activities of the RESAC with the recently established CSU-NASA Education Collaborative by featuring the RESAC as a NASA funded CSU research center involved in a wide-variety of remote sensing applications that help foster the Collaborative goal of improved recruitment and education of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Geography (STEM/Geography) students, and; (4) Integrate research with education through existing programs (internships, extension GIS certificate) and expertise in the CSULB Geography Department and the Learning Alliance at CSULB and extend the program's benefits to K-12 education through a new collaboration with the Department of Science Education at CSULB.

With respect to the SCWHC the specific goals of this proposal are to: (1) Provide stability for the continued development and production of weather and fuels related information products; (2) Provide similar stability for the undergraduate internships that have formed the successful educational component of the Center and have resulted in the development of a Live Fuel Moisture (LFM) database for chaparral; (3) Expand and streamline the delivery of SCWHC information products; (4) Increase the use of delivered SCWHC information products by developing and delivering both web-based and traditional training workshops (targeted towards fire, insurance and planning personnel) focusing on the production and utilization of Fire Center products and integrated with the CSULB internship and extension certificate programs; (5) Expand the focus of the SCWHC to include flood forecasting by integrating the UCSB produced mesoscale weather forecasts with the existing CSULB faculty expertise in hydrologic modeling; and develop K-16 learning module, materials, and activities that can bring NASA data to the next generation of citizens and scientists.