Book excerpt: "The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Environmental Research Laboratory - Corvallis, Oregon (ERL-C), established an Interagency Agreement with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) in September 1990. This agreement began a five year cooperative effort to develop a geographic database for modeling terrestrial climatebiosphere interactions in support of EPA's Global Climate Research Program. Although performing specific tasks under contract to the US EPA, NGDC independently operates a Global Change Database Program (GCDP) as part of its NOAA mission Considerable synergism therefore exists between the tasks performed for the JPA under the "Global Ecosystems Database Project, '' and other activities supporting NOAA Climate and Global Change Program"--Preface