Special Centers & Programs

KBS faculty and staff often receive grants or special contracts, of varying duration (e.g. 2 - 5 years), to conduct research on a particular problem or within a specific area of interest. The special programs and centers created by these grants or contracts are also important resources for KBS researchers and the communities they serve.

EPA Watershed Assessment Classification Systems National Coordination Center

Researchers at the Kansas Biological Survey (KBS), University of Kansas, recently were awarded multi-year grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a watershed classification system for predicting biological impairments and for recommending ecosystem rehabilitation. The KBS project is part of a larger national effort, consisting of 11 research groups around the country. Outcomes from this national program will aid in making policy decisions regarding the best ways to allocate funds for improvement or rehabilitation of watersheds in a manner that will enhance water quality and recreational fishing and ensure better survival of threatened species.

A portion of the KBS award is being used to establish a website that will serve as a central point of coordination for similar projects around the United States. In this role, KBS will promote sharing of results and ideas among researchers working on disparate types of watersheds in different ecoregions of the nation with the goal of improving and protecting our streams and rivers for future generations.

Great Plains Regional Earth Science Applications Center

As we enter the 21st century, critical issues facing the Great Plains agricultural economy include projecting and monitoring crop production and yield, assessing grassland condition and productivity, and monitoring land use/land cover change. To address these issues, NASA established the Great Plains Regional Earth Science Applications Center (GP-RESAC) at the University of Kansas Applied Remote Sensing (KARS) Program in March 1999. The primary goal of the GP-RESAC is to put the results of basic and applied remote sensing research, as they relate to the Great Plains region and its agro-ecosystem, into the hands of end users.

The KARS Program serves as the lead agency in a consortium of private and public entities whose mission is to define end-user needs, carry out fundamental and applied research, disseminate products, and evaluate progress toward established performance metrics. Total NASA and private sector funding to the center and affiliated research activities is $2.51 M.

To accomplish our goal, we are focused on achieving the following objectives:
· Expanding existing partnerships to create a dynamic end-to-end consortium representing the research, service, and end-user communities that will apply remote sensing and attendant technologies to issues of concern in the Great Plains agro-ecosystem.
· Using remote sensing and related technologies to develop an understanding of the near-term productivity and long-term sustainability of the Great Plains agro-ecosystem.
· Using remote sensing and attendant data and technologies to create products and decision support tools for end-users in the public and private sectors of the Great Plains agro-ecosystem communities.
· Distributing remote sensing-derived products and decision-support tools to end-users through both traditional channels and state-of-the-art dissemination technologies.
· Evaluating on a continuing basis the effectiveness of value-added remote sensing products to the Great Plains end-user community through conferences, market research, and other performance metrics.