The objectives of this project are to educate and train the coastal and estuarine science (CES) and engineering communities on the use and development of cyberinfrastructure (CI) that incorporates Grid computing and Web-based portal techniques for the use of simulation tools. As a cornerstone of this effort, a Grid-enabled application, CH3D-GTM, which applies the robust shallow water estuarine model CH3D to the Guana Tolomato Matanzas (GTM) National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR), is used to demonstrate and teach CI concepts to a diverse audience. At the GTM Environmental Education Center, personnel and student fellows are trained, and educational programs are developed to reach K-20 students, teachers and the general public. At the State of Florida's St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD), scientists and engineers are trained on how to deploy models using the CH3D-GTM application as a tutorial. At the University of Florida in Gainesville (UF), faculty and students develop curriculum content based on Grid middleware to teach students how to use, support, deploy, develop and design the CH3D-GTM application and similar simulation models.
This project focuses on workforce development for current scientists and engineers, as well as for future practitioners. In the short term, NERR educators and student fellows and SJRWMD engineers and researchers are being trained, and at least three graduate engineering courses at UF are being enhanced. The long-term goal is to make a significant contribution towards a national CI for science, government and public use. The improved simulation capabilities could then translate into improved ecosystem-based water quality and resource management, emergency preparedness and response, and planned development for these heavily populated and vulnerable regions.
While focused on the CES community, the training methods, materials and software are conceived such that they can be generalized to other application domains and reused in other regions of the country. Outreach activities further broaden the scope of this project by bringing basic CES and CI concepts to K-20 teachers and students that routinely visit the GTM in field trips. This activity builds upon a Web-accessible CES application portal - an on-line, interactive resource for outreach at the GTM, and an educational resource with CI-based simulation experiments that are made publicly available to CES and CI educators at other universities. Through feedback from surveys and assessments conducted in the training and outreach activities, this demonstration provides key insights on how CI educators can better tailor teaching to diverse audiences.
