This project will develop SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), a freely available Web site that will provide easy access to state-of-the-art measurements and reconstructions of long-term environmental data, such as rainfall, temperature, plant and animal distributions, streamflow, and soils. Given a time period and a location, it will display the data graphically and will permit users to download the original high-resolution environmental data. By enabling scholars to easily discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environmental stability and change over centuries or millennia, SKOPE will empower reproducible research on the effects of climatic variation on human societies and the substantial impacts of humans on ancient and modern environments. It will also facilitate ongoing improvement of paleoenvironmental reconstructions. SKOPE will transform vast amounts of prior data collection, modeling, and research into usable environmental knowledge, enhancing the infrastructure of scientific research in such diverse disciplines as agronomy, anthropology, archaeology, ecology, economics, geography, political science, sociology, and sustainability. SKOPE will also make available publicly funded paleoenvironmental data and models to users in industry and government. For example, planners will be able to use SKOPE?s long-term environmental reconstructions to investigate vulnerabilities in infrastructure not revealed by historical experience (for example, streamflow or rainfall regimes outside the ranges of those documented historically). Students will have free access to high-quality environmental scenarios in which to situate their studies. Members of the general public will be able to see how ancient environments differed from those of today. Expanding the community able to obtain and use paleoenvironmental information will increase public scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology.
Recent research has demonstrated that investigations of contemporary societal problems can benefit from the use of long-term environmental data and from comparisons with cases in which the interactions of human societies with their environments is well-documented over centuries. By providing easy access to time- and place-specific long-term environmental data, this project seeks to facilitate those efforts. SKOPE addresses two critical challenges to contemporary science: increasing access to publicly funded research; and ensuring that scientific results are transparent and reproducible. SKOPE will enable users to easily discover, download, visualize, and explore many sources of paleoenvironmental data that resulted from publicly funded research that are now difficult (at best) to find and use. SKOPE will also provide robust support for reproducible scientific research. Datasets provided by SKOPE will be accompanied by a systematic, comprehensible record of their origin and computational derivation, giving researchers an unprecedented ability to understand how the data were obtained.
