TEAM Network: Building Web-based Data Access and Analysis Environments for Ecosystem Services

Abstract A team of ecologists, computer scientists, and engineers from Conservation International (CI) and San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego (SDSC, UCSD) has been collaborating over the past 3 years to develop cyberinfrastructure for the TEAM (Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring) Network of tropical forest field sites. The TEAM project provides real-time data to understand how tropical forest ecosystems are being impacted by global climate change and land cover change and to improve conservation decisions. A major objective of this project is to provide information and services on tropical forest data disseminated by TEAM sites within countries participating in the TEAM network. The cyberinfrastructure provides a pervasive computational ecosystem, integrating grid computing infrastructure with high-performance backend resources, data warehouses, sophisticated client applications, new instruments, and embedded sensors, thus enabling a new paradigm for monitoring, understanding, and managing ecological and environmental systems. This paper presents the TEAM data management, access, and analysis system that provides end-to-end solutions for sensor-based data and field observations collected at TEAM sites. Specifically, two major applications are presented, viz., the “ Data Query and Download Application (DQA )” application, which allows users to navigate and download diverse TEAM datasets such as Tree and Liana Biodiversity, Terrestrial Vertebrate, Climate and Forest Carbon data using a Google Maps based interface; and, the “ Forest Carbon Calculator (FCC) ” application, which calculates tree biomass using equations for forests with different precipitation regimes, thereby predicting relationships between tree biomass, tree diameter and wood density to estimate the amount of above ground carbon in the forests.