This U.S.-Panama EArly-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award, funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5), under the direction of Ms. Jessica Coughlin from the Institute for the Application of Geospatial Technology (IAGT), at Cayuga Community College, will develop a publicly accessible geoportal, Climate 1-Stop, to search, view, download, model, and monitor existing climate and environmental data and projects worldwide. The Climate 1-Stop will be a joint NSF-USAID-NASA initiative with collaborations between researchers, IT specialists, educators, and students from IAGT, University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH), NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, and The Water Center for the Humid Tropics of Latin America and The Caribbean (CATHALAC) in Panama. This geoportal will be a "one stop shop" for climate and environmental experts to stay informed and share information with climate and environmental researchers, decision-makers, and other interested governments and organizations. The geoportal concept grew from NASA's and USAID?s SERVIR initiative, which integrates satellite observations, ground-based data and forecast models to monitor and forecast environmental changes and to improve response to natural disasters. The Climate 1-Stop will use all datasets and model outputs previously incorporated into SERVIR and additional datasets and model outputs will be added throughout the course of the project. The specific datasets and projections will be selected through surveying archive datasets, working with focus groups of climate scientists, and integrating datasets from collaborative partners, including NASA and USAID. The Climate 1-Stop portal will allow various ways to survey climate sites that are not limited, as in other climate sites, by scale, geographic location, targeted end-user, organization, data coverage, data type, site ease-of-use, specific climate change domain or theme. By expanding the data surveying capabilities, the project will open up the development and implementation process to a wide variety of organizations and end users. In addition, the Climate 1-Stop will build on previous experiences and leverage tools and datasets already accepted by the community, but are not easily accessible.
Additionally, this project will provide international research opportunities at CATHALAC for undergraduate students at Cayuga Community College and the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Students will be provided with hands-on experience with environmental problems and solutions through participation in research and development activities. The project activities will also promote and develop multi-disciplinary, multi-national partnerships through broad participation in the resulting geoportal. The Climate 1-Stop will have a specific area within the geoportal geared towards compiling, recording and locating mitigation and adaptation projects and researchers worldwide. This innovative capacity will allow participants to register adaptation and climate change projects, thereby allowing researchers with similar interests and goals easy access to potential collaborators. These new capacities resulting from the Climate 1-Stop geoportal project will quickly advance the knowledge and understanding of climate science and related impacts in a unique, engaging, and clearly-understood format to an unlimited, and in many cases entirely new, audience.
