Empowering people to share their information with others in order to create and build shared understanding about Oregon’s natural resource and environmental issues, problems, and opportunities and to build community networks.

The Oregon Explorer (OE) uses the power of cutting edge information technology to create a state-of-the-art, web-accessible, natural resources digital library. This resource builds upon, accesses and integrates data from state and federal agencies, local governments, university scientists and citizens to support informed decisions and actions by people concerned with Oregon’s natural resources and environment. 

OE provides several critical functions, such as:

• providing background information about natural resources issues in Oregon and contextual information to users who want to learn more about such issues:
• enabling users to quickly find, retrieve, integrate and synthesize geo-referenced and well-organized natural resource and environmental information and access experts through a web portal;
• developing customized data products and tools to provide decision support, streamline environmental permitting and target investments in order to improve natural resource and environmental management in the public and private sectors; and
• empowering users to share their information with others in order to create and build shared understanding about Oregon’s natural resource and environmental issues, problems and opportunities and build community networks.

The OE is a distributed network that links dispersed information providers and users, encouraging them to publish information to the site so that it is broadly available to Oregonians. It assures that information is value-free and neutral, with clear labeling of data quality allowing user evaluation of information quality. Building upon expertise offered by OSU Libraries, OE provides archiving and search tools that enable access to a broad collection of spatial and non-spatial information and allows integration and synthesis of varied types of information including digital documents, maps, computer models, data bases, photographs, video and audio and satellite imagery.

The Oregon Explorer is a collaborative program of INR, the Oregon State University Libraries (OSUL), the Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering (NACSE) and the Oregon Department of Administrative Services Geospatial Enterprse Office (DAS-GEO). 

See the Oregon Explorer Natural Resources Digital Library.