GEOINT 2026 | Megan Compton - USGS

GEOINT 2026: Feeding the AI Pipeline with Foundational USGS Terrains and Cloud Architecture

Behind every dazzling commercial dashboard and automated target recognition model sits the unsung hero of the geospatial community: pristine, high-resolution public mapping data. At the GEOINT 2026 Symposium in Denver, Project Geospatial sat down with Megan Compton of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to explore how the federal entity is modernizing its public data assets.

In this blog post, we look at the immense scale of the 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), tracking how the agency's nationwide high-resolution lidar and hydrography networks provide an uncompromised basemap for both civilian resilience and national security. We map out the technological shifts the USGS is making to break down legacy data silos—moving into cloud-native, instantly accessible delivery pipelines designed specifically to fuel automated AI change detection engines. Dive into the discussion to see how inter-agency cooperation between the USGS, NGA, and private operators is laying down the framework for tomorrow's real-time digital twins.