Issues relating to climate change and food security require an understanding of the interaction between the natural world and human society over long time scales. Understanding climate change, its impacts on the natural world and society, and the tradeoffs inherent in societal responses demands an unprecedented degree of cooperation across academic fields. New data sources on expected future climate, soil characteristics, economic activity, historical weather, population, and land cover, provide a potential basis for this cooperation. New methods are needed for sharing within and across communities not only data but the software used to generate, synthesize, and analyze it. Progress on these research challenges is hindered by the extreme difficulties that researchers, collaborators and the community experience when they collaborate around data. Multiplicity of data formats, inadequate computational tools, difficulty in sharing data and programs, lack of incentives for pro-social behavior, and large data volumes are among the technology barriers. The FACE-IT project employs an integrated approach to cyberinfrastructure to advance the characterization of vulnerabilities, impacts, mitigation, and adaptation to climate change in human and environmental systems. Leveraging existing research cyberinfrastructure the project will create a full-featured FACE-IT Platform prototype with new capabilities for ingesting, organizing, managing, analyzing and using large quantities of diverse data. The project team will collaborate with two distinct interdisciplinary communities to create specific FACE-IT Instances that will both advance their research and enable at-scale evaluation of the utility of the FACE-IT approach.
Many important and challenging problems facing humankind occur at the intersection of the social, physical, biological, and computational sciences. The proposed methods and approaches have general applicability for advancing the use of research information across diverse communities.
