Critical Zone (CZ) scientists take as their charge the effort to integrate theory, models and data from the multitude of disciplines studying processes on the Earth's surface - from the atmosphere at the vegetation's canopy to the lower boundary of actively cycling ground waters. As such, critical zone scientists and their data managers are at the front line of efforts to effectively compile and use the "dark data in the Long Tail" of earth science and integrate that data with the "Big Data" produced by hydrologists, atmospheric scientists, geospatial modelers and molecular biologists.
The NSF EarthCube initiative recently solicited proposals for domain workshops "designed to listen to the needs of the end-user groups that make up the geosciences and to understand better how data-enabled science can help them achieve their scientific goals." The proponents will convene a workshop to bring together critical zone domain scientists with computer scientists active in EarthCube.
This workshop would thus serve two objectives: (1) engage approximately 45 cyber-literate critical zone scientists in the EarthCube process; and (2) inform about 20 of EarthCube's cyberscientists of the diversity needs of CZ science. The overall goal of the workshop would be to develop a set of unifying requirements for the integration of "long tail" data and "big data" and to develop an interactive community of domain and cyber scientists to pursue solutions.
There are many examples of how cyber-infrastructure developed for geoscientists have broader impacts to the public. The national weather service data and model forecasts are highlighted on television and other media outlets. Fishermen, rafters and canoeists rely on USGS gauging data for their recreational activities. The Model My Watershed platform is harnessing GIS and hydrological modeling for educational purposes in classrooms and informal settings and also by citizen scientists.
Critical Zone (CZ) scientists take as their charge the effort to integrate theory, models and data from the multitude of earth science disciplines collectively studying processes on the Earth's surface - from the atmosphere at the vegetation's canopy to the lower boundary of actively cycling groundwaters. The NSF EarthCube initiative aims to transform the conduct of research through the development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure to integrate information and data across the geosciences. This NSF award funded a workshop to engage cyber-literate critical zone scientists in the EarthCube process and to inform EarthCube's cyberscientists of the diversity needs of CZ science. Sixteen CZ disciplines were represented at the workshop with experiences that span the range from Big-Data to Long-Tail science. The national Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) network has begun the process of building a community cyberinfrastructure that the workshop organizing committee feels can serve as a pilot for the EarthCube endeavor of engaging of a diverse community of Earth System scientists to embrace and co-develop a shared data and modeling system. The Critical Zone EarthCube Domain Workshop had 103 registered including 28 early-career scientists (6 graduate students, 11 post-docs, 11 assistant level faculty). Most participants were self-described as representing more than one of the 16 CZ disciplines. Together in the breakout sessions, 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 to answer: How do tectonics, lithology, climate and biology co-determine the evolution of critical zone structure and function?; What are the drivers of energy and material fluxes (i.e. water, sediment, carbon, nutrients, solutes, etc) moving through the critical zone?; How will critical zone structure, function and evolution respond to human and natural disturbances and over various time and spatial scales? Workshop participants identified a critical need for CZ and cyber scientists to co-develop 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. This would require a project to: Engage the CZ and broader community to co-develop and deploy the BiG CZ software stack to meet their specific needs through a CZ community advisory committee and a series of co-design and training & testing workshops Develop the BiG CZ Portal web application for intuitive, high-performance map-based discovery, visualization, access and publication of data on critical zone structure and function by scientists, resource managers, citizen-science volunteers, and the general public. Develop the BiG CZ Toolbox to enable cyber-savy CZ scientists to directly access BiG CZ APIs to search, access, manage and publish data using a turnkey open-source scripting and database package. Develop the BiG CZ Central software stack to bridge data systems developed for multiple critical zone domains into a single metadata catalog for single query search, visualization and access from the Portal web app or using more powerful APIs, and to serve as a public repository for data published via the Toolbox or via web forms. The executive summary and other workshop notes and products are available in this Google Drive collection: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_VW4kvIBAzQSE91SEdkVzlGYkE&usp=sharing Immediately after the workshop, fourteen participants took on the charge from all 103 workshop participants the task of translating the workshop vision into a proposal to NSF Office for CyberInfrastrucure's (OCI) Scientific Software Integration (SSI) solicitation. In March 19, 2013, the proposal team submitted, on behalf of the CZ community, a proposal entitled "SI2-SSI: The community-driven BiG CZ software system for integration and analysis of bio- and geoscience data in the critical zone." The proposal was eventually funded as award # 1339834.
