Coupling Cyberinfrastructure and Geographic Information Systems to Empower Ecological and Environmental Research

Abstract

With the burgeoning global population, complex climate changes, and the growing demand for natural resources, ecological and environmental researchers must look for the best strategies to ensure a sustainable supply of ecosystem services that provide food, water, air, and energy. As in the field of modern molecular biology, where advanced computational technologies play an important role in managing and analyzing massive quantities of genomic data, cyberinfrastructure-based ecological and environmental sciences will contribute significantly to the quest. “Cyberinfrastructure” describes integrated information and communication technologies for distributed information processing and coordinated knowledge discovery, which promises to revolutionize the way that science and engineering are done in the 21st century and beyond (Atkins et al. 2003). Similar to the respective roles of telescopes and particle accelerators in astronomy and high-energy physics, cyberinfrastructure acts as a computational test bed for scientific discoveries. Such computational test beds cross disciplines and serve all sciences; they empower researchers by giving them access to several interrelated components, such as high-performance computers, data, information resources, networking, digitally enabled sensors and instruments, virtual organizations, and observatories, along with an interoperable suite of software (i.e., middleware) services and tools (NSF 2007).

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