The University of New Mexico (UNM) will develop and deploy DataNetONE (Observation Network for Earth), a sustainable long-term data preservation and access network, with related search and discovery, data integration, and user services and analytic tools. The goal of the DataNetONE (Observation Network for Earth) project is to enable scientists, decision-makers, and citizens to understand the nature and pace of change on Earth and to address associated environmental, social, and technological challenges. The initial focus will be on multi-disciplinary observational data collected by biological and environmental scientists, national and international research networks, and environmental observatories. DataNetONE will be extended to serve a broader range of science domains both directly and through interoperability with other DataNet deployments. The project is under the direction of Dr. William Michener at the UNM. DataNetONE is designed to enable the long-term preservation of diverse and complex multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national science data by providing open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data. Expected users include scientists, educators, librarians, resource managers, and the public.
The potential impact of long-term preservation and integrated access to diverse and complex multi-scale, multi-discipline, multinational science data is transformative in the speed with which researchers will be able to assemble and analyze data sets and in the types of problems they will be able to address. Scientific investigations that will be greatly facilitated by DataNetONE include understanding the relationships among human population density, atmospheric nitrogen and carbon dioxide, energy consumption and global temperatures; understanding and predicting the emergence and spread of diseases like avian flu; critical areas where local or regional changes may have strong effects on earth system interactions, feedbacks, or teleconnections; the impact of "megapolitan-ization" on ecological systems; and the interrelationships among coupled human and natural systems.
