Free Republic

Charlie Fisher guided the copper pole into the still pond and poked around. Within seconds, a steady stream of bubbles began to rise, showing signs of life from the spring below. "This is ready to be something special," said Fisher. "It's going to be a great resource." The spring, which on Tuesday afternoon had a healthy coating of a mosslike substance and was clogged with fallen leaves in various autumnal hues, and another just like it on the 43-acre Hunterdon County farm are probably Fisher's last chance to preserve the land. His hope: Going into the bottled water business. Fisher...

Products based on NASA Earth observations and a new Internet-based decision tool are providing information to help land and water managers combat tamarisk (saltcedar), an invasive plant species damaging precious water supplies in the western United States. This decision tool, called the Invasive Species Forecasting System (ISFS), is being used at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Institute of Invasive Species Science in Fort Collins, Colo. It is the result of combining USGS science and NASA Earth observations, software engineering and high- performance computing expertise. "The ISFS combines NASA satellite data with tens of thousands of field sampling measurements, which...