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.

The interagency Civil Applications Committee (CAC) facilitates the appropriate civil uses of overhead remote sensing technologies and data collected by military and intelligence capabilities, including from commercial sources. The CAC is operated and staffed by the U.S. Geological Survey on behalf of the U.S. Department of the Interior and its interagency partners. The director of the U.S. Geological Survey is the chair of the committee, and the vice-chair is a non-Department of the Interior senior official. The CAC ensures certain Federal civil agencies have access to these remotely sensed assets to meet their statutory missions in ways that do not threaten the civil rights, civil liberties, and personal privacy of U.S. citizens. To meets its mandate, the CAC hosts various working groups and communities of interest including those focused on thermal issues (wildland fires and volcanoes), environmental security, and historical satellite imagery.

Dan Opstal and Scott Kaplan, with the Civil Applications Committee, discuss the importance of CAC and why having an organization such as this is so important to the community as a whole. They also describe how they are educating individuals and their partners about how CAC can help in their particular missions. Dan also explains some of the challenges in the industry they are trying to mitigate in the industry such as accessibility to data. Scott also went on to elaborate on the need for improved communication between disciplines and how CAC is trying to help with that.