CERES Program
(California Environmental Resources Evaluation System)

Tremendous volumes of data and information about California's natural environment are generated daily by both public and private sector organizations. Cataloging and making these materials "discoverable" is the primary goal of CERES.

CERES accomplishes this via the standards based California Environmental Information Catalog (CEIC, pronounced "seek"). CEIC uses national standards developed by the Federal Geographic Data Committee and international standards represented by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The California GIS Council has endorsed CEIC as California's primary National Spatial Data Infrastructure node.

CERES has also developed and operates Internet portals around a number of environmental themes like watersheds and land use planning to provide one-stop-shops for environmental data and information within these domains.

Finally, in partnership with NASA and the CalSpace program at UC Davis, CERES has developed and operates the California Spatial Information Library (CaSIL), a unique, no-cost, web-accessible collection of spatial data for California.