--- begin forwarded text
>*********
>Article in the LA Times during week of March 5th thru-9th, 2001
>http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010315/t000022700.html
>WASHINGTON--Last week, Ian Thomas posted a map on a U.S. government Web
>site of the caribou calving areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
>an area the Bush administration wants to open up for oil exploration.
>This week, Thomas is looking for a new job.
>"I'm really flabbergasted," Thomas said Wednesday. "After putting out
>20,000 maps with no problem and then putting out one where baby caribou
>like to hang out, I got fired." [...]
>Government officials say he was fired for working outside of his assigned
>duties. And besides, some of the map information was wrong.
>[...]
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Hi All,
>
>Well, I have been fired for posting to the internet a single web page
>with some maps showing the distribution of caribou calving areas in
>the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
>
>My entire website http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/ has now
>been removed from the internet. This represents about 3 years
>worth of work and 20,000 plus maps showing bird, mammal and
>amphibian distributions, satellite imagery, landcover and vegetation
>maps for countries and protected areas all around of the globe. As
>far as I aware it was one of the biggest collections of maps online
>and certainly the biggest collection showing maps of biodiversity
>and the environment. The website was often visited by over a
>thousand visitors each week. In addition, I was fulfilling roughly a
>dozen requests for geospatial data and information from
>colleagues, other researchers and the general public each day.
>
>All of this comes as a rather big surprise to me. I was given no
>chance to remove the webpage or even finish writing an appeal
>before my position was terminated. I was working under a contract
>so I believe I have very little legal recourse. I have received no
>written explanation (or even an email) stating the exact reasons for
>the termination decision and I understand that even though this
>would be a reasonable courtesy to expect, it is unlikely to be
>forthcoming.
>
> >From my viewpoint my dismissal was a high-level political decision
>to set an example to other Federal scientists. I base this belief on
>the following information I received from a colleague in Alaska who
>is a leading researcher on the issues involved:
>
>"I really hope you don't get fired. In fact, had the timing of what you
>did not been so inappropriate based on everything else that was
>going on, I doubt that anyone would have noticed. Your work
>showed a lot of initiative..."
>
>"...the fallout would not have been so great had the subject matter
>not been one of the three USDOI super hot topics with the new
>administration and had we not been briefing the Secretary at the
>nearly exact time your website went up. Everyone is nervous and
>as I mentioned earlier, consistency in presentation is paramount."
>
>So now, I believe my only recourse is to appeal to the general
>public in the hope that in the future what just happened to me will
>not happen to others.
>
>I would recommend anybody in a similar circumstances to contact
>the fine people at Public Employees for Environmental
>Responsibility (http://www.peer.org) or a similar organization.
>
>The response and support I have received from friends online has
>been truely amazing. I very much appreciate how quickly people
>have acted on my behalf and helped publicize my plight and I
>especially wish to thank the international mapping
>community...receiving letters of support from far away places
>cheers me up no end. Please feel free to forward this email to
>other lists and media contacts! I would also be grateful if anybody
>who misses all the maps I put on the internet please contact the
>USGS to let them know and to ask that the maps be reposted.
>
>I feel very bad that these events are also affecting my colleagues at
>Patuxent. Patuxent was a great place to work, has amazing
>researchers and everybody I worked with is very supportive.
>
>Many, many thanks for your support,
>
>Ian Thomas
>[log in to unmask]
>
>
>The Details:
>
>Nobody instructed/authorized me to post the web pages on Arctic
>National Wildlife Refuge. It was done on my own initiative. I was
>working on land cover maps for all National Wildlife Refuges using
>the new National Landcover Datasets. Last week I published over
>1000 land cover maps online covering every National Wildlife
>Refuge and National Park in the lower 48. (These maps have now
>been removed from the internet too). Similar land cover data for
>Alaska were not available but the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
>had a good landcover map so I included it.
>
>In the past, I helped produce the only set of maps online showing
>all bird species distributions in Alaska. In addition I have produced
>online mammal distribution atlases of Africa, maps for tigers in asia
>and I was working on digitizing North American mammal range
>maps produced by the Smithsonian Institution.
>
>I have also been conducting background research to prepare
>proposals to study the effects of mineral extraction on biodiversity
>and protected areas on a very large scale. One such proposal that
>I was preparing would have looked at exporting analysis and
>mapping methods applied in the United States to other regions of
>the World such as Africa. The proposal was co-sponsored by the
>Mineral Division of USGS and the World Resources Institute.
>
>The migration of caribou in North America is the closest thing that
>we have to the great mammal migrations that occur in Africa.
>African protected areas are also under great pressure from possible
>development for mineral extraction. So the carribou distributions
>that I found on the Fish and Wildlife Service public website were of
>particular interest. I have also worked for several years on maps of
>migratory bird distribution patterns. I therefore have a great interest
>in other migratory animals as many of the temporal mapping
>problems are similar.
>
>I was completely unaware that there was anything wrong with
>publishing ANWR maps. I have never been informed of any agency
>restrictions or any other guidelines on publishing maps depicting
>ANWR...I only now have been informed that there is a two week old
>agency "communications directive" that limits who is allowed to
>distribute new information on ANWR within my agency.
>
>I thought that I was helping further public and scientific
>understanding and debate of the issues at ANWR by making some
>clearer maps. I also hoped that colleagues in USGS would see the
>maps and then contact me if they needed additional mapping help.
>I was careful to quote my sources and explain what I had done. I
>made no statement about what the maps might mean with regard
>to oil development of the refuge.
>
>The web pages were put up on Wednesday, March 7, last week.
>The first thing I did when I put the ANWR pages up on the internet
>was to inform other USGS Biological Resources Division mapping
>people and other agency (Fish Wildlife Service and National Park
>Service respectively) GIS people through email that they were on
>the web. Informing other Federal colleagues and agencies
>immediately upon publication to the web appears to me to be the
>only reasonable review process available, seeing as there is no
>internal review website currently available...I have never been
>informed of any other established proceedure for review of web
>content on our site. I actually haven't had any complaints about or
>requests to change any other map on my website...
>
>I assumed that if anybody had a problem they could contact me
>directly and quickly and appropriate steps could be taken almost
>immediately. I received one warning from a colleague that the maps
>I put on the internet should be removed. Unfortunately, it was sent
>on Saturday so I did not receive it in time. I think the decision to
>terminate me was taken before I even got to work on Monday.
>
>I also assumed that because all I was doing was esentially
>presenting existing public information in a clearer and improved
>format, there was very little need for any extensive review other
>than the steps I took. Indeed the changes that I made to the
>original Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) web maps were simply to
>digitize them ("trace"), then overlay them on satellite and
>vegetation maps and then summarize how may years specific
>areas were a high density caribou calving area. I found a similar
>(poor quality) summary map on the FWS website that allowed me
>to check the accuracy of my simple analysis.
>
>I was unaware that FWS had updated the data. There is no
>mention of updated information on the FWS website. This new
>data has still to be made public. If my maps were inaccurate in any
>way so are the public FWS maps I copied.... (please refer to
>http://www.r7.fws.gov/nwr/arctic/pchmap2.html#section6)
>
>I think that over the last three years I have put more maps up on
>the internet (at a guess approaching 20,000 to 30,000 static
>individual maps) equalling any other website on the world wide web.
>So out of the tens of thousands of maps (and hours) I finally
>publish one that got me fired....I suppose the odds were going to
>run out eventually....
>
>I am concerned that other Federal researchers may easily make
>the same mistakes I just made and should learn from my example
>what happens if you're not careful.
>
>Patuxent was a great place to work, has amazing researchers and
>everybody I worked with is very supportive.
>
> Ian Thomas
>
>
> Former Mapping Specialist at the:
> GIS & Remote Sensing Unit
> Biological Resources Division
> United States Geological Survey
> Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
>
>Old Homepage (no longer available)
>http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/home.html
>
>The Global Environmental Atlas (no longer available)
>http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/cindi/world.html
>
>
>
>
>
>+++++++++++++++++++++
>Michael R. Meuser,
>[log in to unmask]
>
>http://www.mapcruzin.com/
>Community-Based Research, GIS, WebMaps,
>Environmental Justice, Right-to-Know Advocacy
>
>Website Archiving, Data Mining
>http://www.mapcruzin.com/services.htm
>
>
>____________________________________________________________
>T O P I C A -- Learn More. Surf Less.
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>
>
>
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The University of Iowa
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