The Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) will have archived over a terabyte of heterogeneous image data by the end of this year. Other LTER sites are similarly amassing large, complicated data sets. Ecologists want to transform this raw data into useful information to provide new insight into long - term ecological phenomena. Unfortunately, the procedures, software tools, and user friendly interfaces necessary to facilitate access to these data sets over high-speed networks are currently lacking. This precludes analysis on supercomputers at national centers and subsequent visualization by ecologists located at remote sites. The specific objective of the research will be to develop software that not only enables but encourages LTER ecologists to more fully utilize multi-resolution, multi-spectral, time- varying, multi-dimensional data from Sevilleta. The solutions developed will be driven by the particular needs of the Sevilleta ecologists and will be applicable to other LTER sites. This does not preclude the design of more generic components, with a broader scope of application. The goal of the collaboration among the Khoros Project at the University of New Mexico, the Sevilleta LTER site, and San Diego Supercomputer Center is implementation of a prototype system whereby researchers can access, analyze, and visualize Sevilleta data from remote locations.
