Introduction to the Global Fiducials Program

The Global Fiducials Program is a collaborative effort between Federal Civil Agencies, Academia, and the Intelligence Community. Since the late 1990s, the Program has continuously collected images of environmentally significant sites from around the world through the use of U.S. National imagery systems. The principal goal is to build and maintain a long-term record of environmental data to support scientists and policy makers. This data has been archived in a repository known as the Global Fiducials Library (GFL). At the Program's inception, it was anticipated that in the future - perhaps as much as twenty-five years out - GFL data could be openly released. Now, with the support of the Intelligence Community, the goal of the Program has changed direction in an effort to make this growing collection of images publicly available. This has been accomplished by using data from the GFL to generate unrestricted images, referred to as literal imagery derived products (LIDPs). Since 2008, more than 4,500 LIDPs have been generated and released for public consumption through a U.S. Geological Survey website, the Global Fiducials Library Data Access Portal.