Collaborative Research: Extending Lifemapper to Enable Macroecological Research

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。堪萨斯大学和康涅狄格大学获得了合作资助，开发软件，以收集、可视化和分析大陆和全球范围内物种分布的大型数据集。拟议的计算软件和网络服务工具将从互联网来源收集有关任何焦点物种地理分布的所有可用数据。一旦收集到数据，数据就会进入一个计算管道，进入一个生态位建模环境，该环境产生关于单个物种潜在分布的信息，这些信息反过来将被映射到多物种地理网格上。这些多物种网格被宏观生态学家用来分析物种的地理空间格局，并确定当前物种分布和生物多样性空间格局的生态和进化原因。宏观生态学分析还能够分析大陆尺度上环境变化的潜在影响。该项目除了生成多物种数据网格供研究外，还将开发基于“宏观生态学空间分析”软件套件的网络服务软件工具，该软件套件由康涅狄格大学维护（http://www.ecoevol.ufg.br/sam/）。堪萨斯大学将为该项目设计服务器软件架构和计算网络服务，以其现有的物种地理空间数据档案和基于集群的环境利基建模项目“Lifemapper”（http:// www.lifemapper.org）为基础。提出的软件基础设施有望通过降低多物种网格组装和分析的技术障碍，催化重要生态和进化地理空间问题的宏观生态建模活动。这种整合是一个明显且具有成本效益的机会，可以加速这一年轻而重要的领域的研究。宏观生态学正在解决的研究挑战包括生物学家今天能够做出的最重要和最有见地的研究预测，以预测包括全球气候变化在内的自然环境变化对生物的影响。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).The University of Kansas and the University of Connecticut are awarded collaborative grants to develop software to gather, visualize and analyze large data sets of the distribution of species on continental and global scales. The proposed computational software and web services tools will gather together all available data on the geographical occurrence of any focal species from Internet sources. Once gathered, the data enter a computational pipeline to an ecological niche modeling environment that generates information on the potential distribution of individual species, which, in turn will be mapped on multi-species geographic grids. These multi-species grids are used by macroecologists for analyses of the geospatial patterning of species and for determining the ecological and evolutionary causes of current species distributions, and biodiversity spatial patterns. Macroecological analysis is also capable of analyzing the potential impacts of environmental changes on continental scales. This project, in addition to generating multi-species data grids for study, will also develop web services software tools based on the "Spatial Analysis in Macroecology" software suite maintained at the University of Connecticut (http://www.ecoevol.ufg.br/sam/). The University of Kansas will engineer the server software architecture and computational web services for the project, building on its current species geospatial data archive and cluster-based, environmental niche modeling project "Lifemapper" (http:// www.lifemapper.org).Ultimately, the proposed software infrastructure is expected to catalyze macroecological modeling activity on important ecological and evolutionary geospatial questions by lowering the technical barriers to multispecies grid assembly and analysis. This integration is an obvious and cost-effective opportunity to accelerate research in this young, important field. The research challenges being addressed by macroecology include the most vital and insightful research predictions biologists can produce today to anticipate the biotic consequences of the changing natural environment, including global climate change.