MAPPING OUR NATION: HOW VOLUNTEERS ARE MODERNIZING THE U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY'S NATIONAL MAP

The National Map, along with its citizen volunteer program, The National Map Corps (or TNMCorps), is a program within the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS was officially founded in 1879, but the topographic mapping of public lands has been an essential duty of the Geological Survey since at least a century prior. The National Map is essential for practical and scientific research, bettering our understanding of the physical landscape, and is highly useful for emergency response and recreation.

Through an internship program at UNAVCO, we became volunteers with TNMCorps. Our project involved utilizing the USGS’s National Structures Database and digitized topographic maps to find and update information on the current locations of certain man-made structures. We used reliable sources, such as primary sources directly created by the entity or secondary sources created by service recipients, and official websites to confirm the physical addresses of various essential buildings such as schools, hospitals, and city halls, then inputted that information into the database and adjusted the markers on the map so that their locations were up to date. As standard editors, our work was reviewed by peer editors. By the end of the internship program, we had both successfully researched and updated over 1,400 individual structures, tracking 17 different types of man-made structures. We were then upgraded from standard editors to peer reviewers, where we updated over 50 structures that had been edited by other standard editors before the internship ended. Through a scientific poster, we share the inner workings of The National Map, the importance of its citizen science program, and how others can get involved.