The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has just launched an online Water Forum to collect public input on how it can best protect and improve America’s waters. Input is open to any interest — from planning, to scientific tools, to low impact development, to green infrastructure. The emphasis is on means to better use resources and improve outcomes.

The feedback received on the online forum will help lead the discussion at EPA’s water conference where they will engage more than 100 water executive and local water leads from around the country.

The “virtual fence” sensor web project along the Mexican border has been stripped of $50Million of federal stimulus funds by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano due to cost overruns and missed deadlines. The fence has been installed and is undergoing testing in two areas along the Arizona border, but there are no plans to extend it. Instead the funds are being diverted to personal tech for border guards, including laptops, radios, thermal imaging devices and cameras.

Read more in this story from the New York Times.

The American Public Works Association (APWA) has just created the APWA Center for Sustainability. The mission of this organization is to create the next generation of public works professionals that work closely with a more engaged and better informed public, and take an integrated systems approach to addressing livability and community issues.

A statement from APWA president Larry Koehle sums up the mission and approach:

“We believe we are creating better solutions for public works management by focusing on sustainable ideas for innovation, collaboration, leadership and whole systems thinking. The Center’s leadership team includes 12 sustainability leaders and subject matter experts from North America who are already creating a foundation for sustainable action throughout public works departments.”

The Earth Engine is an idea that spun out of work that Google.org was doing with the Google Earth Outreach Program in Brazil with indigenous people and non-profit organizations focused on conservation. The scientists were happy with Google Earth, but expressed the need for a system that could not only map, but also monitor, deforestation in the Amazon.

I spoke with Rebecca Moore, the Engineering manager of Earth Engine and Google Earth Outreach, about the impetus and objectives of the Earth Engine project.

Here’s Moore on the design:

“The idea will be to ultimately provide for public benefit an online repository that brings together all of the Earth’s observation data (satellite imagery, terrain datasets, vector data such as roads, borders, population centers, soil information, climate information) into one large georeferenced data store. And then to provide, through an easy to use application programming framework, access to our computational resources for analyzing that data.

We see this as an unprecedented platform for data-mining meaningful information out of this treasure trove of historical, current and future earth observation data. Ultimately it will be many petabytes of earth observation information.”

Google expressly places this within their non-profit arm, with the plan to enable the storage and add the computing capacity, but not to create any algorithms or conduct any monitoring themselves. This new site will act as a tremendous enabler for the spread of remote sensing data and analysis, and can ultimately become the kind of c0-laboratory that was envisioned in Al Gore’s Digital Earth speech.

Read the full interview here.

There’s a growing (renewed?) interest in the Internet of Things around the benefits for a more instrumented and connected city. IBM organized a session at SXSW in Austin that took place this morning titled, “City as Platform.” The objectives of the session was to discuss the role of information architects, the interface of systems with the built world, the steps needed to transform the thinking of planners and builders toward viewing the city as a platform, and the role of citizens  in the design.

Participants include an impressive array of technologists, city advocates, and planners/designers. The session is certainly an important one for wider advocacy of this “system of systems” thinking. The makeup of the panel and the objectives of the session are fully outlined on this Blog post from the Smarter Planet blog, with promises for a recap post and podcast to follow.

The following video from IBM was posted today to YouTube, and it provides a great overview of IBM’s view of “The Internet of Things.”

With a lot of smart phones now provisioned with capable Google Maps navigation and directions, handheld GPS devices need to continue to innovate in order to stay relevant. A dedicated GPS device still makes a lot of sense for outdoor recreation off the beaten path and away from cell phone networks that can serve up other navigation services.

Yesterday’s announcement that Garmin has invested in Intermap’s detailed 3D digital mapping data, makes good sense. This high-resolution data far exceeds the quality and detail for 3D terrain, a critical element for back-country navigation. We’re seeing a similar approach from DeLorme with their recent addition of the SPOT emergency locator to communicate with text messages via satellite in areas where there is no cell phone signal. These moves continue to make these devices relevant to the outdoor enthusiast, who are the primary market for these devices into the future.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to announce a new 10-year initiative to give the United States “the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.” The goal is to assure that at least 100 million homes have access to broadband networks at speeds of at least 100 megabits per second (20 times faster than today’s average speed).

The Broadband Initiative is funded through the Recovery Act, and details can be found at www.broadband.gov. Among the details coming out about the National Broadband Plan roadmap is the creation of a wireless network for first responders (fire, police, public safety) to communicate and share data and video during major emergencies. The use of broadband for education and access to healthcare records is another priority.

Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, asserts that the United States is lagging far behind other countries in broadband adoption and speed, with a third of Americans having no access to high-speed Internet service.

It’s a shame to read that Canadian climate research will likely continue to go unfunded, meaning the demise of the decade-old Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences. This research entity has been working on studies related to climate change such as the melting arctic, the consequence of permafrost thaw, and the pattern of drought in the praries. The Foundation has a mandate that runs through 2012, but it hasn’t received any funding since the Conservative government took charge in 2006. Without any funding, it will likely shutter its doors this year.

It’s concerning that science continues to be censored in areas of atmospheric research and global change. Assessing and understanding the trends and impacts of climate change should have no political bias, as the consequences affect everyone. Such a research network fosters larger science of an interdisciplinary and collaborative nature that follows no agenda and that cannot be swayed by politics. Perhaps it’s time for more of a global entity for research and science on this topic, taking advantage of the work of the Group on Earth Observations and facilitating coordinated global research efforts.

There’s a nice feature in today’s New York Times that outlines the use of open mapping tools to deal with a crisis. The focus is on Ushahidi, with the title, “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis”.

“This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.”

Read the full feature from the New York Times here.

Researchers from Stanford and the University of California, Riverside are working to harness the power of accelerometers to build a seismic detecting network out of ordinary computers. Accelerometers detect movement and are increasingly being used in devices such as iPhones to flip from vertical to horizontal and Wii controllers. Many of today’s laptop computers already have accelerometers installed, and thanks to their high use they are a low-cost (under $50) item to add if the computer doesn’t have one.

The idea is to have a geographically distributed network of computers, and one or more computer in large buildings, that each send readings automatically to a central database. The amount of data that would be collected would far surpass what’s available today. The network is coming together now as the Quake Catchers Network, with more than a thousand computers already signed on.

Read more about this concept in this feature from the Los Angeles Times.