INTERDISCIPLINARY GEOSCIENCE DATA IN FIELD CONTEXT USING FLYOVER COUNTRY, A MOBILE APP

The wealth of geospatially referenced data available in geoscience domain repositories offers a new opportunity for geologists and the public to engage with the work of researchers using mobile technologies in the field. Flyover Country (FC; fc.umn.edu) is a mobile app developed for geoscience outreach from the air that helps users understand the geology below them as they look out of the airplane window at 10 km altitude. FC caches geologic maps and points of interest including data from Macrostrat, Neotoma, Paleobiology Database, and Wikipedia, visualizing data from many disciplines on the same map. Its offline and location-aware capabilities create contextual feedback, placing data in its field context, and the field site in the context of data from previous studies. Visualizing data on the spot allows novel questions to be asked, methods to be formulated, and projects to be planned and executed quickly, robustly, and dynamically. FC is as useful for teaching field camp as it is for cheating at field camp. Further applications include exposing extant field trip guides and incorporating data from domain repositories to give students and the public insight into the ways that scientists collect and leverage data, as well as providing additional analytical data to support and refine interpretations of established field stops. Flyover Country’s role in data aggregation, exposure, and visualization also provides the EarthCube community with a testbed for data services’ ability to quickly provide data in a geographically constrained, lightweight, and flexible manner.