The Critical Zone (CZ) science community takes as its charge the effort to integrate theory, models and data from the multitude of disciplines collectively studying processes on the Earth's surface. The Critical Zone is Earth's permeable near-surface layer - from the atmosphere at the vegetation's canopy to the lower boundary of actively circulating groundwaters. The Critical Zone was a term coined by the National Research Council's Basic Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences (BROES) Report (2001) to highlight the imperative for a new approach to thoroughly multi-disciplinary research on the zone of the Earth?s surface that is critical to sustaining terrestrial life on our planet. In January 2013, 103 members of the CZ community met for the CZ-EarthCube Domain Workshop (NSF Award #1252238) to prioritize the CZ community's key science drivers, key computational and information technology ("cyber") challenges and key cyber needs. They identified that the central scientific challenge of the critical zone science community is to develop a "grand unifying theory" of the critical zone through a theory-model-data fusion approach. Work participants unanimously described that the key missing need of this approach was a future cyberinfrastructure for seamless 4D visual exploration of the integrated knowledge (data, model outputs and interpolations) from all the bio and geoscience disciplines relevant to critical zone structure and function, similar to today?s ability to easily explore historical satellite imagery and photographs of the earth's surface using Google Earth. This project takes the first "BiG" steps toward answering that need.
The overall goal of this project is to co-develop with the CZ science and broader community, including natural resource managers and stakeholders, a web-based integration and visualization environment for joint analysis of cross-scale bio and geoscience processes in the critical zone (BiG CZ), spanning experimental and observational designs. Our Project Objectives are to: (1) Engage the CZ and broader community to co-develop and deploy the BiG CZ software stack; (2) Develop the BiG CZ Portal web application for intuitive, high-performance map-based discovery, visualization, access and publication of data by scientists, resource managers, educators and the general public; (3) Develop the BiG CZ Toolbox to enable cyber-savvy CZ scientists to access BiG CZ Application Programming Interfaces (APIs); and (4) Develop the BiG CZ Central software stack to bridge data systems developed for multiple critical zone domains into a single metadata catalog. The entire BiG CZ Software system will be developed on public repositories as a modular suite of fully open source software projects. It will be built around a new Observations Data Model Version 2.0 (ODM2) that is being developed by members of the BiG CZ project team, with community input, under separate funding (NSF Award #1224638).
