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USDA Forest Service Geospatial Technology and Applications Center (GTAC)

    The Forest Service's Remote Sensing Applications Center (RSAC) is in Salt Lake City, Utah, co-located with the agency's Geospatial Service and Technology Center. Guided by national steering committees and field sponsors, RSAC provides national assistance to agency field units in applying the most advanced geospatial technology toward improved monitoring and mapping of natural resources. RSAC's principal goal is to develop and implement less costly ways for the Forest Service to obtain needed forest resource information.

    The National Robotics Engineering Center Agricultural Person-Detection Dataset

      Person detection from vehicles has made rapid progress recently with the advent of multiple high-quality datasets of urban and highway driving, yet no large-scale benchmark is available for the same problem in off-road or agricultural environments. Here we present the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) Agricultural Person-Detection Dataset to spur research in these environments. It consists of labeled stereo video of people in orange and apple orchards taken from two perception platforms (a tractor and a pickup truck), along with vehicle position data from Real Time Kinetic (RTK) GPS. We define a benchmark on part of the dataset that combines a total of 76k labeled person images and 19k sampled person-free images. The dataset highlights several key challenges of the domain, including varying environment, substantial occlusion by vegetation, people in motion and in nonstandard poses, and people seen from a variety of distances; metadata are included to allow targeted evaluation of each of these effects.

      Unit process data for bio-jet fuel production from poplar biomass via bioconversion at a biorefinery

        A partial Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is conducted to investigate the life cycle impacts of a biorefinery designed to convert poplar tree chips into jet fuel via fermentation and subsequent hydrogenation. The goal of producing jet fuel from Populus (poplar) trees (bio-jet) is to create an alternative to petroleum based jet fuel (petro-jet). Currently no jet fuel producing biorefineries are in commercial operation and the results of this LCA will be used to assess a potential environmental impact that could result from scaling up the proposed system. Work is part of the Advanced Hardwood Biofuels Northwest project.