PARENT SESSION
Poster Session: Management & Planning

Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge: providing distributed data and computational resources for ecologists. ^*ROMANELLO, SAMANTHA J. ¹, ^*PENNINGTON, DEANA D. ¹, MICHENER, WILLIAM K. ¹, BEACH, JAMES H. ², JONES, MATTHEW B. ³, LUDAESCHER, BERTRAM ⁴ and SCHILDHAUER, MARK ³, ¹ LTER Network Office, Albuquerque, NM, USA² Biodiversity Research Center, Lawrence, KS, USA³ National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, CA, USA⁴ San Diego Supercomputer Center, La Jolla, CA, USA

ABSTRACT- Understanding and sustaining the natural world in the 21st century depends on improving our capacity to access ecological data; mining these data for new knowledge; and conveying new insights to decision–makers and the general public. Computer Science and IT research are poised to effectively address many of these issues by advancing our ability to conduct large–scale, collaborative, ecological research. Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) is cyberinfrastructure being developed to address the many challenges associated with data accessibility and integration of large-scale biocomplexity data in the ecological sciences. SEEK encompasses three integrated systems: (1) EcoGrid — the next generation internet for data and workflow storage, sharing, access and analysis; (2) a Semantic Mediation System — an advanced search tool that can determine whether relevant data and analytical components may be automatically transformed for use with a selected workflow; and (3) an Analysis and Modeling System — a visual, automated environment where ecologists can modify and incorporate workflows to compose new analyses and models. SEEK thus enables ecologists to efficiently capture, organize and search for data and analytical processes (i.e., scientific workflows) from their desk-top in a user friendly interface—ultimately providing resources typically out of reach for many ecologists. The prototype application is ecological niche modeling; however, additional applications will be funded in this 5-year, NSF-funded ITR project.

KEY WORDS: data grid, analytical workflow, ecoinformatics, ecological niche model, semantic mediation