This project develops a process for mobilizing a group of distributed, interdisciplinary scientists into a community of practice that is able to effectively embed technology-enhanced approaches into their work, and investigates methods for enabling collaborative research design. The project uses a combination of education, training, and mentoring tasks informed by creative thinking and problem-solving theory, social science, and organizational learning theory. The project is being conducted with a group of scientists engaged in forecasting the impact of climate, population, and land cover/land use change on plant distributions in the American Southwest, and investigating human and environmental consequences of those changes. There are three academic research groups represented from University of New Mexico, University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University. Each group is approaching the problem from different perspectives ? including field studies, remotely sensed change detection, simulation modeling, public participation and decision-making. Collectively they will develop approaches that integrate the strengths of each. This project will partner the scientists with technology and cyberinfrastructure specialists and make use of our best understanding of community learning and collaboration to collectively discover effective ways to overcome these barriers. The project uses five activities to accomplish its goals: 1) virtual seminars using videoconference technology, 2) graduate student mentoring, 3) collaborative design exercises, 4) training on relevant technologies, and 5) development of a virtual collaboratory. All activities integrate research with education through problem-based, experiential learning by a community of practice in the context of real problem solving.
