ITR: Development of an enhanced computer-assisted analysis system for earth science investigation of laminated sediments and tree rings

0219075 Overpeck具有逐年分辨率（isannual resolution proxieslo）的自然档案，如树木年轮、纹状沉积物、珊瑚、软体动物和洞穴沉积物，对于了解过去环境变化的性质以及未来可能发生的变化越来越重要。这些档案最明显的用途是了解自然年际到世纪尺度气候变化的模式和原因，以及人类如何改变这种变化。然而，它们也是越来越广泛的地球科学应用的核心，包括记录古地震活动，校准放射性碳时间尺度，调查水文变化和了解古生态系统动力学。他们提供绝对时间尺度的能力，需要了解这些动态在许多社会相关的时间尺度是特别重要的。 目前，从这些来源中提取信息是非常劳动密集型的，从而导致对时间分辨率和复制的不期望的限制，这导致关于感兴趣的环境信号的过度不确定性。这一点甚至适用于使用复杂的探测器进行基本测量时，因为必须非常小心地将一系列测量结果串成很长的时间序列，同时保留所有可能在以后的分析中有用的信息。现有的图像分析软件无法单独解决这个问题。这些记录所需的劳动密集型分析产生了开发可用于更有效地处理样品的仪器的强烈动机，这项信息技术研究小额赠款计划（ITR）的奖励将支持开发用于自动计算每年分层气候变化代理的软件（树的年轮和纹）。 这些发展是基于一个原型计算机辅助树木年代学工作站和相关的控制和图像分析软件（TREES v. 1），该软件以前由NSF的人类学计划（BCS-9601867）资助给共同PI Schowengerdt。 该奖项将支持创建TREES v.2，这是TREES v.1的基于Linux的PC版本，专门为SUN平台编写，以及VARVES v.1，也是基于Linux的软件，旨在自动计算分层湖泊和海洋沉积物。 ***

0219075OverpeckNatural archives with year-by-year resolution (isannual resolution proxieslo), such as tree-rings, varved sediments, corals, mollusks, and speleothems, are becoming increasingly critical for understanding the nature of past environmental variability, and how it may change in the future. The most obvious use of these archives is in understanding the patterns and causes of natural interannual to century-scale climate variability, and how humans may be altering this variability. They are also central, however, to an increasingly broad range of Earth Science applications, including documenting paleoseismicity, calibrating the radiocarbon time scale, investigating hydrologic variability, and understanding paleoecosystem dynamics. Their capability to provide the absolute time scale needed to understand these dynamics on many societally-relevant time scales is particularly important. At present, extracting information from these sources is extraordinarily labor-intensive, resulting in undesirable limitations on temporal resolution and replication that result in excessive uncertainties concerning the environmental signals of interest. This applies even when sophisticated detectors are used to make basic measurements, since great care must be taken in stringing series of measurements together into very long time series whilst retaining all information that might turn out to be useful later in the analysis. Existing image-analysis software alone cannot solve this problem. The labor-intensive analysis that these records require has created a strong incentive to develop instrumentation that can be used to process samples more efficiently, and with more interpretive power than is available from off-the- shelf image processing software.This Information Technology Research Small Grants Program (ITR) award will support the development of software for automated counting of annually laminated climate change proxies (tree rings and varves). The developments are based on a prototype computer-assisted dendrochronology workstation and associated control and image analysis software (TREES v. 1) that was previously funded to co-PI Schowengerdt by NSF's Anthropology program (BCS-9601867). This award will support the creation of TREES v.2, a Linux-based PC version of TREES v.1, which was written exclusively for the SUN platform, and VARVES v.1, also Linux-based software designed to automate counting of laminated lake and marine sediments. ***