Building an ecoinformatics platform to support climate change adaptation in Victoria

Our research is focused on developing an ecoinformatics platform to support climate change adaptation in Victoria. A multi-disciplinary, cross-organisational approach was taken in developing a platform of collaboration to support the understanding of climate change impact and the formulation of adaptation strategies.The platform comprises a number of components including: (i) a metadata discovery tool to support modelling, (ii) a workflow framework for connecting climate change models, (iii) geographical visualisation tools for communicating landscape and farm impacts, (iv) a landscape object library for storing and sharing digital objects, (v) a landscape constructor tool to support participatory decision-making, and (vi) an online collaboration space for supporting multi-disciplinary research and cross-organisational collaboration.In this paper we present the platform as it has been developed to support collaborative research and to inform stakeholders of the likely impacts of climate change in southwest Victoria, Australia. We discuss some of the drivers for research in developing the ecoinformatics platform and its components. We conclude by identifying some future research directions in better connecting researchers and communicating scientific outcomes in the context of climate change impact and adaptation.► VREs are useful to support climate change adaptation research. ► Visualisation is a powerful front-end to climate and biophysical models. ► Challenges remain in e-Science in supporting (near) real-time decision making. ► Data-driven’ science is identified with a movement towards ‘open science’. ► e-Science needs to consider both soft (people) and hard (technology) systems.