Collaborative Research: Extending Lifemapper to Enable Macroecological Research

该奖项由2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(公法111-5)资助。堪萨斯大学和康涅狄格大学获得合作拨款，用于开发软件，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因特网来源收集关于任何重点物种地理分布的所有现有数据。一旦收集到数据，这些数据就进入了一条通往生态位建模环境的计算管道，该环境生成了关于单个物种潜在分布的信息，然后这些信息将被绘制在多物种地理网格上。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。宏观生态分析还能够分析环境变化对大陆尺度的潜在影响。该项目除了生成用于研究的多物种数据格网外，还将基于康涅狄格大学(http://www.ecoevol.ufg.br/sam/).)维护的《宏观生态中的空间分析》软件套件开发网络服务软件工具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.lifeapper.org)为基础。最终，拟议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，催化在重要的生态和进化地理空间问题上的宏观生态建模活动。这种整合是加快这一年轻而重要领域研究的一个明显且具有成本效益的机会。宏观生态学正在应对的研究挑战包括生物学家今天可以做出的最重要和最有洞察力的研究预测，以预测不断变化的自然环境，包括全球气候变化的生物后果。

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.