ABSTRACT WyomingView is one of twenty-seven members of the AmericaView program (www.americaview.org), funded by the USGS (americaview.usgs.gov). One of the goals of WyomingView is to promote remote sensing educational opportunities in Wyoming for its current and future workforce. Since its inception in 2002, WyomingView has worked with federal, state and local government agencies to identify remote sensing training needs. These activities have resulted in the development of several short courses aimed to benefit managers and remote sensing specialists in the Bureau of Land Management, Wyoming Game &amp; Fish, and Wyoming State Engineers Office. These courses are offered in Laramie and other cities in Wyoming through our mobile teaching lab. Currently we are working to develop internet based courses to reduce travel time and cost, and we offer flexibility to agency personnel with our mobile teaching laboratory. Through seminars and other mechanisms, WyomingView has increased the breadth of remote sensing courses offered at the University of Wyoming. WyomingView has provided data, teaching materials and software to faculty members in various academic departments to promote remote sensing research and education

Assistant Research Scientist Ramesh Sivanpillai

Kenneth L Driese

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ASPRS 2007 Annual Conference 
Tampa, Florida ♦ May 7-11, 2007 
REMOTE SENSING EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE THROUGH 
WYOMINGVIEW 
 
Ramesh Sivanpillai, Assistant Research Scientist 
Kenneth L. Driese, Remote Sensing Scientist 
Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center 
University of Wyoming 
Laramie, WY 82071 
sivan@uwyo.edu 
kdriese@uwyo.edu 
 
 
ABSTRACT 
 
WyomingView is one of twenty-seven members of the AmericaView program (www.americaview.org), funded by 
the USGS (americaview.usgs.gov).  One of the goals of WyomingView is to promote remote sensing educational 
opportunities in Wyoming for its current and future workforce.  Since its inception in 2002, WyomingView has 
worked with federal, state and local government agencies to identify remote sensing training needs.  These activities 
have resulted in the development of several short courses aimed to benefit managers and remote sensing specialists 
in the Bureau of Land Management, Wyoming Game & Fish, and Wyoming State Engineers Office.  These courses 
are offered in Laramie and other cities in Wyoming through our mobile teaching lab.  Currently we are working to 
develop internet based courses to reduce travel time and cost, and we offer flexibility to agency personnel with our 
mobile teaching laboratory.  Through seminars and other mechanisms, WyomingView has increased the breadth of 
remote sensing courses offered at the University of Wyoming.  WyomingView has provided data, teaching materials 
and software to faculty members in various academic departments to promote remote sensing research and 
education. 
 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
One of the goals of the WyomingView consortium (http://www.wygisc.uwyo.edu/wyview) is to promote 
remote sensing education in Wyoming for its current and future workforce.  This paper describes WyView 
educational activities and how they have benefited personnel in government agencies, and students and researchers 
at the University of Wyoming.  WyomingView is one of twenty-seven members in a national consortium called 
AmericaView (http://www.americaview.org) funded by the US Geological Survey (http://americaview.usgs.gov).  
WyomingView, like the other 27 stateview programs, aims to promote remote sensing technology by 1) building a 
consortium of users from agencies, academic institutions, private companies and NGOs, 2) building a state-wide 
archive of remotely sensed satellite data and making it available through web-based clearing houses, 3) promoting 
remote sensing education for both students and professionals, and 4) testing the utility of remotely sensed data for 
addressing natural resources monitoring and mapping in the state (Driese and Sivanpillai, 2004). 
 
 
PROMOTING REMOTE SENSING EDUCATION 
 
Current workforce 
Through targeted outreach activities we identified the remote sensing needs of several federal and state 
government agencies in Wyoming (Figure 1).  After listening to an overview of remote sensing and its potential for 
monitoring and mapping natural resources, personnel in these agencies were asked about their specific tasks and 
their current level of remotely sensed data use.  Through such discussions we identified several reasons for the 
under-use of remotely sensed data and technology.  Issues related to data format and suitability, and complexities 
associated with pre-processing were major hurdles that prevented seamless integration with their work-flows.  To 
overcome these barriers WyomingView developed two short courses aimed at promoting wide-spread use of 
remotely sensed data. 
ASPRS 2007 Annual Conference 
Tampa, Florida ♦ May 7-11, 2007 
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
# of contacts 65 73 17 258 10 216 639
Federal State County Academic
Native 
tribes
Others Total
 
Figure 1. Number of individuals contacted through WyomingView outreach activities. 
 
The first of these short-courses familiarizes managers and technical experts in these agencies with the steps 
involved in managing a remote sensing project.  The primary objective of this course is to introduce the suitability of 
different types of remotely sensed data for a range of natural resources management applications.  For example, the 
trade-offs associated with acquiring medium-resolution versus high-resolution data for mapping land cover changes 
or vegetation characteristics are discussed.  The second short-course focuses on overcoming technical difficulties 
associated with learning a complicated image processing software.  Through the use of freeware (e.g., ERDAS 
Viewfinder) specialists in agencies can view remotely sensed data and also perform simple analyses relevant to their 
day-to-day activities. 
WyomingView also maintains a satellite data archive consisting of Landsat, ASTER and MODIS images.  
These data are available to users in Wyoming (and elsewhere) in ready-to-use format at no- or low-cost.  After 
participating in our outreach or training, federal and state government agency personnel have requested and obtained 
Landsat images for applications ranging from monitoring to land cover change analysis to assessment of vegetation 
recovery following prescribed fire treatments (Sivanpillai and Driese, 2007).  Our targeted outreach activities 
combined with the WyView data archive have resulted in numerous remote sensing projects throughout the state.  
We intend to conduct additional outreach to smaller agencies and user groups and continue to add satellite data to 
our archive. 
At the University of Wyoming, we have used academic seminars to promote WyomingView resources to 
faculty and researchers.  Such seminars are also tailored for the research interests within each academic department 
and feature remotely sensed images acquired in Wyoming to highlight opportunities for incorporating satellite data 
in ongoing or new research.  We also educate faculty about technical support available through WyomingView to 
assist them on issues relating to integrating satellite data into GIS.  By helping with data integration and image 
classification we were able to help several faculty members incorporate remotely sensed data into their work.  In 
addition, some faculty members also use these images as a back-drop for illustrating spatial phenomena such as land 
cover changes or the landforms of Wyoming.  Thus images from the WyomingView archive are used as teaching-
aids.   We will continue to present WyomingView to other academic departments. 
ASPRS 2007 Annual Conference 
Tampa, Florida ♦ May 7-11, 2007 
Future workforce 
       Workforce development is an important priority in Wyoming, and WyomingView personnel contribute by 
involving students in remote sensing at many levels, from research internships to curricular course teaching to 
advising.  These activities are focused on providing students with a solid foundation in remote sensing so that they 
can these skills with them to the workplace.   The rural nature of Wyoming and its outdoor heritage result in many 
students who study natural resource or wildlife management and who graduate to jobs in resource management 
agencies.  By exposing them to remote sensing we hope to infuse this technology into their future work. 
One set of students benefiting from the WyomingView program are those enrolled in the remote sensing 
courses taught at UW.  Instructors introduce WyomingView resources and encourage the students to use satellite 
data for their class research projects. For example, several students were able to obtain data pertaining to their 
geographic or thematic area of interest.  The WyomingView data archive includes “wall-to-wall” multitemporal 
coverage of Wyoming and students can often find the images required to address their research questions.  Using 
these resources, students have assessed the impact of wildfires, land cover changes due to natural and anthropogenic 
factors, and vegetation characteristics.  Several students have incorporated satellite data into their thesis or 
dissertation research after gaining the experience to process these data. 
Another set of students benefiting from the WyomingView program are those who enroll for independent (or 
directed) studies with guidance and supervision from WyomingView personnel.  These students have worked on 
projects that involve assessing the land cover changes and other topics.  WyomingView data have been used 
extensively, for example, to assess vegetation response to drought, man-made changes due to energy recovery 
activities, or wildfire.  Students used many Landsat images to accomplish their research goals, which would have 
been unaffordable for them without the free satellite data source offered through WyomingView.  Selecting and 
purchasing these images might not be possible within the time constraints of a semester (14 weeks). 
Students have also benefited from the internship opportunities offered through WyomingView.  Students work 
on real world remote sensing applications under the supervision of experts who train them on various steps 
associated with a remote sensing research project.  Since 2003, seven undergraduate and three graduate students 
have received WyomingView internships.  Students gain valuable experience on pre-processing, classifying images 
and integrating classified images with GIS data.  Students are encouraged to present their work in regional meetings 
and academic seminars. 
 Currently almost all of WyomingView efforts to train our future workforce in remote sensing is limited to 
the University of Wyoming (UW), Laramie.  Wyoming also has a community college system, with campuses 
throughout the state, and we plan to shift some of our focus to these institutions in the future.   In addition to 
Wyoming students, WyomingView has provided satellite data to students in more than 12 states in the US and in 2 
Canadian provinces for thesis and term research projects (Sivanpillai and Driese 2007).  Like UW students, these 
students have requested multi-temporal satellite data.  Students often requested scenes covering Yellowstone 
National Park, the Powder River Basin and western Wyoming (active energy development areas) to assess wildfire 
impacts or anthropogenic activities. 
 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
Using a relatively small financial investment to initiate and maintain the program, WyomingView has 
stimulated remote sensing research and educational activities in Wyoming.  Targeted outreach and training activities 
have resulted in increases in the use of satellite data in federal and state government agencies.  The satellite data 
archive maintained by WyomingView has complemented its outreach activities and enabled users in government 
agencies, private companies and academic institutions to obtain and process large volumes of data for little or no 
cost.  Students and researchers at the University of Wyoming and academic institutions throughout the U.S. have 
benefited from the WyomingView data archive.  Internships and other research opportunities provided by 
WyomingView have resulted in the development of valuable job-skills for undergraduate and graduate students.  
Programs like WyomingView serve as an excellent example of how U.S. taxpayers’ dollars can be used efficiently 
for education and future workforce training.  
 
 
ASPRS 2007 Annual Conference 
Tampa, Florida ♦ May 7-11, 2007 
WEB RESOURCES 
 
AmericaView Inc. program page – http://www.americaview.org 
ASTER (NASA) program page – http://terra.nasa.gov/About/ASTER/index.php  
ASTER (MODIS) program page - http://edc.usgs.gov/products/satellite/aster.html 
MODIS (NASA) program page – http://terra.nasa.gov/About/MODIS/index.php 
MODIS (USGS) program page – http://edc.usgs.gov/products/satellite/modis.html 
USGS – AmericaView program – http://americaview.usgs.gov 
Wyoming Geographic Info Science Center – http://www.wygisc.uwyo.edu 
WyomingView program description page – http://www.wygisc.uwyo.edu/wyview 
WyomingView data description page – http://www.wygisc.uwyo.edu/wyview/data.html 
WyomingView data ordering interface – http://www.wygisc.uwyo.edu/wyview/orderform.html 
 
 
REFERENCES 
 
Driese, K.L., Sivanpillai, R., 2004.  The WyomingView program: A grassroots approach for promoting application 
of remotely sensed data to Wyoming issues, Proceedings of the 2004 ASPRS Annual Conference, Denver, 
CO. 
Sivanpillai, R., Driese, K.L., 2006. Wyoming's New View on Remote Sensing. Geospatial Solutions 16(9):20-25 
Sivanpillai, R., Driese, K.L., 2007. WyomingView: Promoting Remote Sensing Applications with no-cost satellite 
Data. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 73(3):223-227 
 
 


Remote sensing educational opportunities available through WyomingView,

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Remote sensing educational opportunities available through WyomingView,

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