The goal of this project is to develop a practical cyberinfrastructure prototype to facilitate the study of the way in which multiple environmental factors, including climatic variability, affect major ecosystems along an elevation gradient from coastal California to the summit of the Sierra Nevada. An understanding of the coupling between the strength of the California upwelling system and terrestrial ecosystem carbon exchange is the central scientific question. Additional scientific goals are to better understand the way in which atmospheric dust is transported to Lake Tahoe and an examination of carbon flux in the coastal zone as moderated by upwelling processes. The geographic context is one in which there is a diversity of ecosystems that are believed to be sensitive to climatological changes. The dispersion and complexity of the data needed to answer the scientific questions motivate the development of a state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure so facilitate the scientific research. This cyberinfrastructure will be based around the integration of access to distributed and varied data collections and data streams, semantic registration of data, models and analysis tools, semantically-aware data query mechanisms, and an orchestration system for advanced scientific workflows. Access to this cyberinfrastructure will be provided through a web-based portal.
