EarthCube All Hands Meeting 2016

CRESCYNT was delighted to participate with other science, technical, and governance groups at the EarthCube All Hands Meeting 6-8 July 2016 in Denver. This was a terrifically useful gathering – so helpful to be face-to-face once a year or so to accelerate the collective work that happens through conference calls, emails, google docs, sheets, and webinars.

Here’s the poster that CRESCYNT presented to deepen and broaden interactions with other EarthCube groups in our unified goal of meeting the technological needs of geoscience research in answering critical science questions that can only be managed with the assistance of essential cyberinfrastructure. The poster and a slide presentation both emphasized that (1) the challenges for coral reef research span a significant range of scales, and a broad collection of disciplines; and (2) integrating data and analysis vertically and horizontally – in both the figurative and literal senses! – are essential challenges for coral reef work. This area also faces the need to (3) manage multiple forms of critical imagery and other complex data forms, and (4) manageably use and share an explosion of new software, tools, and techniques, and (5) to figure out how to do it without the existence of a community-consensus data repository and community-tailored metadata standards and semantics – or (6) to arrive at the most critical of these standards quickly as a community, borrowing on work already accomplished for narrower, specific coral reef projects or in other fields.

 

>>>Go to the blog Masterpost or the CRESCYNT website or NSF EarthCube.<<<

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Coral Reef Research Use Cases

During the International Coral Reef Symposium we were able to gather a collection of coral reef research use case summaries, particularly during our workshops and node meetings; some of these will be further developed into full use cases. In this instance, “use case” refers to a real research example that particularly emphasizes data and analysis workflows and associated pain points – defining the challenges researchers face with technological needs. and a way of gathering user requirements from this community for EarthCube architecture. We’re working in conjunction with a broader effort at EarthCube to collect use cases from multiple geoscience communities for just this purpose.

Below is a selection of these summary use cases for coral reefs – the range of scales and diversity of  disciplines is both remarkable and very characteristic of coral reef research work. We invite you to submit your own coral reef use case summary information!

Interestingly, while the range of scales and diversity of disciplines are both very great, the reported COLLECTIVE DATA NEEDS of coral reef researchers are remarkably consistent. Here’s a quick word cloud reflecting the expressed data needs of researchers – very similar even though the tools required to address the science questions vary by scale and discipline. (Specific statements underlying this representation listed above underneath Coral Reef Use Cases heading for summaries).

>>>Go to the blog Masterpost or the CRESCYNT website or NSF EarthCube.<<<