CDI-TYPE II: Building and studying a virtual organization for adaptation to climate change

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The world as we know it will be transformed by climate change with one-third of known species threatened with extinction, diseases projected to emerge in new areas, disruption of the ecosystems that provide our food and water, and urban environments at increased risk from rising sea levels. To diminish the negative impact of impending climate change, various strategies are being investigated, including societal ?adaptation? to increase eco-system tolerance. Climate change adaptation can include activities like managed relocation of species (like armadillos in Indiana), building habitat corridors to allow species to move into newly appropriate habitat, maintaining engendered species in zoos and botanic gardens, growing genetically modified drought-resist crops in newly dry regions, planting non-native trees to maximize carbon sequestration, or constructing large-scale levees to protect low-lying coastal areas like Manhattan. Relatively little is known about the conditions under which climate change adaptation activities can be successful or about their potentially disastrous side effects. Addressing this problem raises fundamental questions about the relationship of humans to natural systems that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Increasingly, policymakers recognize that evaluation of adaptation strategies must be integrative and interdisciplinary, informed by expertise in environmental science, law, engineering, and other disciplines. Adaptation to climate change necessitates an unprecedented mobilization, coordination and integration of data, information, and knowledge, enabled by emerging technologies and cyberinfrastructure. This award creates a climate adaptation virtual organization linking people and shared resources to enable informed decision-making and novel research. The Collaboratory for Adaptation to Climate Change relies on cyber infrastructure, data management, and computational algorithms including tools to generate ecological projections, survey data on expert opinion, an information clearing house on regulation related to adaptation, interactive mapping with geographic information systems, mining of social media on the issue of climate change, and data mining algorithms that integrate these elements to create forecasts under uncertainty. The Collaboratory promises to be transformative in its inter-disciplinary integration and will lead the science of adaptation to climate change. The ultimate goal is to make the Collaboratory a onestop-shop that encompasses multiple dimensions of climate change adaptation.