Beyond Ecosystem Modeling: A Roadmap to Community Cyberinfrastructure for Ecological Data-Model Integration

In an era of rapid global change, our ability to understand and predict Earth's natural systems is lagging behind our ability to monitor and measure changes in the biosphere. Bottlenecks to informing models with observations have reduced our capacity to fully exploit the growing volume and vari...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Global change biology 2021-01, Vol.27 (1), p.13-26
Main Authors: Fer, Istem, Gardella, Anthony K, Shiklomanov, Alexey N, Campbell, Eleanor E, Cowdery, Elizabeth M, Kauwe, Martin G De, Desai, Ankur, Duveneck, Matthew J, Fisher, Joshua B, Haynes, Katherine D, Hoffman, Forrest M, Johnston, Miriam R, Kooper, Rob, LeBauer, David S, Mantooth, Joshua, Parton, William, Poulter, Benjamin, Quaife, Tristan, Raiho, Ann, Schaefer, Kevin, Serbin, Shawn P, Simkins, James, Wilcox, Kevin R, Dietze, Michael C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
accessibility
benchmarking
Biosphere
Calibration
community cyberinfrastructure
Data
data assimilation
Data collection
Data integration
Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Ecosystem
ecosystem models
Environmental changes
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Forecasting
Global information infrastructure
Integration
interoperability
Modelling
Models, Theoretical
Opinion
Reproducibility
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In an era of rapid global change, our ability to understand and predict Earth's natural systems is lagging behind our ability to monitor and measure changes in the biosphere. Bottlenecks to informing models with observations have reduced our capacity to fully exploit the growing volume and variety of available data. Here, we take a critical look at the information infrastructure that connects ecosystem modeling and measurement efforts, and propose a roadmap to community cyberinfrastructure development that can reduce the divisions between empirical research and modeling and accelerate the pace of discovery. A new era of data‐model integration requires investment in accessible, scalable, and transparent tools that integrate the expertise of the whole community, including both modelers and empiricists. This roadmap focuses on five key opportunities for community tools: the underlying foundations of community cyberinfrastructure; data ingest; calibration of models to data; model‐data benchmarking; and data assimilation and ecological forecasting. This community‐driven approach is a key to meeting the pressing needs of science and society in the 21st century.
ISSN:1354-1013
1365-2486
DOI:10.1111/gcb.15409