2. IMPORTANCE OF NATIONAL SECURITY SYSTEMS DATA TO DEVELOPMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL RISK ASSESSMENT The fragile arctic and subarctic ecosystems are important natural resources for both countries and are under increasing pressure for economic development. Both sides agreed that the specific activities of the EWG Oil and Gas Subgroup should be focused on methods to obtain the information and perform the analyses needed to ensure environmental security while exploring economic development. The EWG was given a unique opportunity to derive information from data sources unavailable to the public and to make products that can be shared with the public through the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission (GCC). The following attributes make NSS data (particularly imagery data) unique and therefore of high value to environmental risk assessment: 1. Historical imagery data, if available for a particular site, can be decades old and provide an irreplaceable and unique record that can serve as a baseline of past conditions. In addition, if historical imagery of a site over multiple dates is available, a reliable time- series analysis can be completed; 2. The high spatial resolution of NSS imagery data can provide “ground truth” in relatively small areas and can aid in the interpretation of coarser-spatial-resolution data such as SPOT and Landsat. The GIS database, and thus the risk assessment, can then be extrapolated to wider geographic areas; 3. NSS imagery data may be the only data available for otherwise remote and inaccessible areas; and 4. The high-detail data that can be derived from NSS imagery markedly improves the reliability of GIS-based environmental risk assessments.
