The challenges of a Big Data Earth

AbstractThe potential of big data fused with the vision of a digital Earth offers powerful opportunities to deepen understanding of the whole Earth system and the management of a sustainable planet. It is important to stand back from often confusing detail to clarify what those opportunities are and how they might be seized. The essential scientific potential of data, big or small, is to reveal patterns, which have often been the fundamental first step in stimulating inquiry, leading to new questions, new perspectives and potentially to new answers. The digital revolution has created a “digital microscope” that permits us to see patterns that have not been seen before, and when coupled with machine learning technologies to analyse them in creating statistical predictions of the behaviour of both human and non-human systems. These potentials converge with the imperative to represent an Earth system with interacting non-human and human components, as a vital contribution to the understanding and actions req...