Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics - BDEI - Spatio-temporal Models of Biogeophysical Fields for Ecological Forecasting: A Cross-Disciplinary Incubation Activity

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EIA-0131937Henebry, GeoffreyUniversity of Nebraska - LincolnBDEI: Spatio-temporal models of Biogeophysical Fields for Ecological Forecasting:A Cross-Disciplinary Incubation Activity SummaryWe are now in an era of intensive earth observation: orbital platforms generate myriad remote sensingdatastreams across a range of spatial, temporal, spectral, and radiometric resolutions. The number andvariety of "eyes in the skies" are scheduled to increase significantly over the next few years. Thisveritable data deluge necessitates new ways of thinking about transforming remote sensing data intoinformation about ecological patterns and processes. These datastreams hold the promise forenvironmental decision support. Yet, there is a critical need for theories and tools that will enable efficientand reliable characterization of spatio-temporal patterns contained in image time series. We think thatsuch tools must be based on ecological expectations of land surface dynamics, analogous toclimatological expectations. Ecological expectations would summarize across specific regions the typicaltemporal development of spatial pattern in biogeophysical fields. We have a robust principal method forextracting ecological expectations from remote sensing datastreams: projecting image time series intopattern metric spaces. To make ecological forecasting an operational possibility, we need the capabilityto establish and to update complex spatio-temporal baselines that will enable prediction of the usual andidentification, quantification, and assessment of the unusual. A recent NASA workshop on Earth Sciencedata mining identified anomaly detection as a key characteristic of scientific data mining; yet, there arerelatively few examples of spatio-temporal data mining of biogeophysical data. Our approach is spatio-temporal datamining that is informed by relevant domain expertise. Representation of the spatio-temporalentities and fields in databases must support sophisticated spatio-temporal queries: a capability that doesnot currently exist.