The FIU Coastal Environmental Data (CED) GIS Center is FIU’s hub for geospatial research, coastal and environmental data, research data management, research computing, and digital scholarship.
Located within FIU Libraries, the Center provides interdisciplinary expertise, technology, data infrastructure, and research support to students, faculty, research groups, and external partners. Building on decades of GIS and remote sensing expertise, the Center is expanding its role to address a growing challenge at FIU: how to effectively manage, compute, preserve, discover, and share increasingly large and complex coastal and environmental research data.
At the center of this expanded mission is EnviStor, FIU’s environmental research data and computing initiative. EnviStor connects large-scale data storage with research computing, metadata, visualization, and research data management—creating an integrated environment for researchers to discover, manage, process, preserve, and share environmental data.
Coastal Environmental Data and EnviStor
Environmental research increasingly depends on diverse and data-intensive resources, including GIS datasets, historical aerial photography, satellite and remote sensing imagery, field observations, coastal and ecological data, and other research products.
The CED GIS Center brings together the expertise and infrastructure needed to support these resources throughout their research lifecycle—from acquisition and processing to metadata, computing, visualization, preservation, and reuse.
EnviStor is a major component of this new role. Developed through collaboration among FIU Libraries, Computer Science, the Division of Information Technology, and interdisciplinary research groups, EnviStor provides a smart data infrastructure integrating storage, computation, metadata, research data management, and visualization.
- A 2.7 PB environmental research data repository
- Research data management through Dataverse
- Smart data pipelines for environmental research data
- Agentic AI-assisted data and metadata workflows
- Integrated research computing
- Environmental data discovery and sharing
- Data visualization and ArcGIS dashboards
- Collaboration with 15+ interdisciplinary FIU research groups and centers
Through EnviStor, the Center is moving beyond supporting individual GIS projects toward developing shared environmental data and computing infrastructure for interdisciplinary research at FIU.
Our Research and Services
Geospatial and Environmental Data
The Center preserves, curates, and shares geospatial and environmental data from FIU and community partners for teaching, research, and public access. This includes historical aerial photography and maps, environmental datasets, and born-digital geospatial materials. Services include digitization, georeferencing, metadata creation, AI-assisted metadata generation, data curation, ArcGIS publishing, visualization, and research data management through EnviStor and Dataverse.
GIS, Remote Sensing, and Research Computing
The Center provides expertise and computing resources in GIS, remote sensing, imagery processing, GeoAI, geoinformatics, geoscience, and geospatial data science. Research resources include remote sensing and imagery-processing platforms, photogrammetry workstations, advanced surveying equipment, 3D scanners, and drone-related equipment. Center staff also provide consultation, training, workshops, geospatial analysis, and technical expertise for externally funded research projects.
Geospatial Web Applications
The Center develops and maintains geospatial web applications and public interfaces for research, university, and library projects. Working with principal investigators, research teams, funding partners, and FIU IT, the Center supports the complete application lifecycle—from project planning and data management through development, testing, cloud infrastructure, security, visualization, and long-term maintenance. The Center currently maintains 20+ geospatial web applications.
Research, Teaching, and Collaboration
The CED GIS Center has led or participated in more than 62 grant-funded projects, advancing research in areas such as ecological science, Everglades restoration, sea level rise and living shorelines, transportation planning, security research, and AI-driven geospatial applications.
Teaching and academic support remain fundamental to the Center’s mission. The Center supports 39 credited GIS and geospatial courses, manages more than 4,000 active FIU GIS user accounts, and directly supports more than 30 researchers and PhD candidates.
A GIS Faculty Advisory Committee representing 23 faculty members across disciplines and colleges helps ensure that Center resources and services remain aligned with FIU’s research and teaching priorities. The Center collaborates broadly across FIU, including with Computer Science, the Division of Information Technology, the Institute of Environment, Engineering, CARTA, CASE, and other interdisciplinary research groups and centers.
A New Model for Coastal and Environmental Research
The evolution of the GIS Center into the Coastal Environmental Data GIS Center reflects FIU’s growing research priorities in Environment & Environmental Resilience, Health, and Technology & Innovation.
Its location within FIU Libraries creates an important bridge between the Library’s responsibilities for data stewardship, preservation, discovery, and access and FIU’s capabilities in geospatial science, environmental research, advanced computing, and artificial intelligence.
With EnviStor as a central component of this transformation, the CED GIS Center is building a shared environment where researchers, students, data specialists, and technology teams can work across disciplinary boundaries.
The Center’s expanded mission brings together geospatial expertise, coastal and environmental data stewardship, research computing, and AI to support the next generation of environmental research at FIU.