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Ecoinformatics Collaboratory Projects
The Collaboratory is active in several areas of Ecoinformatics that span fields from biodiversity conservation to the economic valuation of ecosystem services. We also collaborate in large projects both in the USA and Europe, as well as providing technologies and know-how to support projects and teaching programs as far away as Brazil and south-eastern Asia.
Many of our project have to do with making information accessible in new, more efficient ways. For example, we have been developing web-accessible databases where information is semantically tagged so that users can request aggregations and analyses that are performed automatically, and apples are never mixed with oranges. We can provide models and analytical workflows that users can run in their web browser without the need of any additional software. Our databases can integrate information from many different, remote sources transparently and without ambiguity.
This page lists our main areas of interest and the most important projects we lead or participate into. Most of these projects have their own separate page on this site for further information. Also see the press section, where flyers in PDF format can be downloaded for many of our projects, and the bibliography.
Section index
Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services
The next step: the ARIES project
Integrated modelling the Earth's social, economic and ecological dynamics
Enabling the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge
Environmental and Agricultural modelling in the European Union
| Economic Valuation of Ecosystem Services
The support of the National Science Foundation allowed us to develop the Ecosystem Services Database (ESD). The ESD allows users to compare ecosystem service economic values across geographic regions, and verify all the components that went into their formulation: not just the values but also the raw data, the valuation methods and the documented analytical streams that produced them. The ESD includes results from a comprehensive list of studies that attempt to estimate non-market values for ecosystem services, and uses an editorial board to certify the quality of the information and provide incentives to data sharing by peer reviewing data and models.
See the ESD page for more details, or go directly to the database at esd.uvm.edu. Feel free to explore the ESD tutorial to get a feeling for all the new potential that the ESD design brings to the table. |
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| The next step: the ARIES project
The ARIES project aims to continue the ESD project and community, and to expand it into an integrated framework capable of assisting a decision maker in estimating ecosystem services provision and the correspondent range of economic values in a specified area, according to a consistent and recognized set of methodologies. This framework will guide its users through all phases of ecosystem services assessment: from the selection or input of data about an area of interest, through the analysis or projection of ecological data to perform an ecosystem service provision assessment, to the estimation of the correspondent economic values. ARIES will store both data and models in declarative form in order to allow the regular update and extension of both. Its data content will be linked to the ESD, but also to data sources such as the National Ocean Economics Project and SEEK's Ecogrid.
The picture illustrates the proposed ARIES components and their interaction in a user workflow. |
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| Integrated modelling the Earth's social, economic and ecological dynamics
The Global Unified Metamodel of the Biosphere (GUMBO) is an exploration through simulation modeling into the global dynamics and interactions of the earth sociology, economy, and ecology. GUMBO is aimed at assessing the dynamics of ecosystem services.
GUMBO is central to many activities at the Ecoinformatics Collaboratory that rely on the ability to generate and analyze global change scenarios whose definition includes economic and cultural dimensions. Among the project that use or depend on GUMBO are the Ecosystem Services Database and the ARIES framework. The model can be downloaded from this site and will be made available through a web interface. |
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| Enabling the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge
The Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) is a five year initiative designed to create cyberinfrastructure for ecological, environmental, and biodiversity research and to educate the ecological community about ecoinformatics. SEEK participants are building an integrated data grid (EcoGrid) for accessing a wide variety of ecological and biodiversity data and analytical tools (Kepler) for efficiently utilizing these data stores to advance ecological and biodiversity science. An intelligent middleware system (SMS) will facilitate integration and synthesis of data and models within these systems.
The Collaboratory is one of many participants to the SEEK effort, which is a large coordination of institutions from the USA and Europe. SEEK's official site is seek.ecoinformatics.org. |
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| Environmental and Agricultural modelling in the European Union
The Ecoinformatics Collaboratory is the only US partner in the SEAMLESS project (System for Environmental and Agricultural Modelling: Linking European Science and Society), financed by the European Union and aiming to develop analytical and policy management tools for agricultural and agroforestry systems within the context of multifunctional land use and sustainable rural development. The official URL of the SEAMLESS project is www.seamless-ip.org.
SEAMLESS is a large project involving 29 participants from 13 countries and a budget of 15 million Euro. The Ecoinformatics Collaboratory will bring our competence in semantically-explicit database and modeling, and will have a substantial involvement in Work Package 4 (database design) and 5 (modeling infrastructure). |
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