Thesis: What is the NRI?

Since I am in the middle of writing my Master's thesis and many people have questions as to what I am actually researching, I have decided to take this next week to introduce my research. My research is on in-stream sampling in quality control and its application to the NRI.

Today is an introduction to the NRI, the data set with which I work.
Monday I will explain quality control at large.
Tuesday I will explain in-stream sampling methods and their importance in quality control.
Wednesday I will explain my analyses on the NRI data.
Thursday I will try to conclude and tie things together.

I hope that this week will be understandable and let you into my world of statistical research.

In conjunction with the Center for Survey Statistics and Methodology (CSSM) at ISU, I work for the United States Department of Agriculture on the National Resources Inventory (NRI) which is conducted by the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). The goal of the NRCS is to provide information to the government about the conservation on U.S. private lands. The data in the NRI is a means to accomplish this goal.

The NRI assess the status, condition, and trends in soil, water, and other natural resources on all non-Federal lands. This survey is longitudinal, meaning that it is a continuous inventory over time. The lands which are surveyed are in all 50 States plus Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Island, and some Pacific Basin locations.

The NRI contains data on land cover, land use, soil erosion, prime farmland soils, wetlands, habitat diversity, and conservation practices at more than 800,000 sample sites. As you can imagine, this is a complicated data set with a plethora of information.

The data is collected by people all over the Nation who are trained to view areal photographs of the land and answer a set of questions. I do not actually collect the data, but I am working with this data after it has been coded. So essentially, I work with a data set of numbers on which I perform statistical analyses.

So that, in a nut shell, is the NRI.