Central National Technology Support Center Staff

Dr. Emil H. Horvath

Natural Resource Specialist

Updated 04/06/2005

Background

Emil Horvath has BS and MS degrees in Agronomy from Purdue University, a Soil Science and Photo Interpretation Diploma from ITC-Netherlands, and a Ph.D. in Soil & Water Sciences/Range Management from the University of Arizona. After six years of research on satellite image processing for land use studies starting in 1969 at the laboratory for the Applications of Remote Sensing at Purdue, he completed his studies in Arizona, where he also taught courses in Basic Soils, Taxonomy and classification, and Salinity. He then worked as a contractor with the Earth Resources Observation Data Center of the USGS in Sioux Falls, SD, and then with TRW in California as a GIS and Remote Sensing specialist. He joined USDA/NRCS (US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service) in 1989 as the National Headquarters GIS Lab manager and then in Fort Worth, TX as leader for GIS & Remote Sensing and later founded and led the Geospatial Databases branch. From 1997 until 2000 he was Director of the USDA/NRCS Information Technology Institute, and from 2000 until 2004 he was Director of the Natural Resources Inventory and Analysis institute in Forth Worth, TX.. He is a founding member and past director (1992-2002) of the Open GIS Consortium. He is fluent in German and Spanish.

During his tenure with NRCS Emil has been a leader and active member of working groups on WWW Home Page, the Chesapeake Bay interagency panel, geospatial databases, national database selection, GIS implementation strategies, ARCPAD evaluation for NRI data collection, Customer Service Toolkit, the NRI Advisory Board, the CSREES review panel, and Soils Data Warehouse-NRI connectivity. He has taught short courses on Remote Sensing and satellite image processing in Alaska, Connecticut, and overseas in Argentina and in Bulgaria. As director of the NRCS Information Technology Institute, he was sponsor and co-architect of the MIT orthoserver, a key method used today to serve Digital Orthophotography and other large image data sets online. Emil is now a Natural Resources Specialist with the Central National Technology Support Center.

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