The Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative established a Data and Information Management Working Group in the summer of 2006. This group is made up of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists and other individuals from the member organizations who are working together to assemble a comprehensive inventory of data that will be maintained over the life of the Initiative. The Working Group is using a variety of technologies and methods to make data pertinent to the conservation decision-making process available as online resources for scientists and resource managers engaged in the Initiative.

Currently, the Working Group is using a newly developing infrastructure within the U.S. Geological Survey called the Scientific Data Catalog. The data catalog makes use of open standards to bring disparate data sets together in a way that they can be accessed and shared among many different applications. The group is working to bring this catalog approach together with other activities such as the Wyoming GeoLibrary project being conducted out of the University of Wyoming's Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center (http://partners.wygisc.uwyo.edu/wygeolibrary/). There are many different data and information management activities in progress that impact the total data resource that can be made available for the Southwest Wyoming area. The Working Group will make every effort to find creative ways to leverage all of these activities and augment where necessary to produce a viable and sustainable data resource for science-based, landscape-scale conservation activities.

A prototypical view of the developing scientific data catalog for the Southwest Wyoming area that simply taps into a few known and established data resources can found at the following link: USGS Scientific Data Catalog Prototype.