RIDIR: Collaborative Research: Developing and Deploying SKOPE--A resource for Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments

该项目将开发SKOPE（过去环境综合知识），这是一个免费提供的网站，可以方便地访问最新的测量和重建长期环境数据，如降雨、温度、动植物分布、河流流量和土壤。给定一个时间段和一个地点，它将以图形方式显示数据，并允许用户下载原始的高分辨率环境数据。通过使学者们能够轻松地发现、探索、可视化和综合几个世纪或几千年来环境稳定性和变化的知识，SKOPE将使气候变化对人类社会的影响以及人类对古代和现代环境的重大影响的可重复研究成为可能。这也将有助于不断改善古环境重建。SKOPE将把大量先前的数据收集、建模和研究转化为可用的环境知识，加强农学、人类学、考古学、生态学、经济学、地理学、政治学、社会学和可持续性等不同学科的科学研究基础设施。SKOPE还将向工业和政府用户提供公共资助的古环境数据和模型。例如，规划人员将能够使用SKOPE？S长期环境重建，以调查历史经验未揭示的基础设施脆弱性（例如，历史记录范围之外的河流或降雨制度）。学生将可以自由使用高质量的环境场景来进行学习。普通公众将能够看到古代环境与今天的环境有何不同。扩大能够获取和使用古环境信息的群体将提高公众的科学素养和公众对科学技术的参与。最近的研究表明，对当代社会问题的调查可以从长期环境数据的使用和与人类社会与环境的相互作用的案例进行比较中受益，这些案例在几个世纪以来得到了充分的记录。本项目通过提供方便获取特定时间和地点的长期环境数据，力求促进这些努力。SKOPE解决了当代科学面临的两个关键挑战：增加获得公共资助研究的机会；确保科学结果是透明和可复制的。SKOPE将使用户能够轻松地发现、下载、可视化和探索许多来自公共资助研究的古环境数据来源，这些数据现在很难（充其量）找到和使用。SKOPE还将为可重复的科学研究提供强有力的支持。SKOPE提供的数据集将伴随着系统的、可理解的数据来源和计算推导记录，使研究人员能够前所未有地了解数据是如何获得的。

This project will develop SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), a freely available Web site that will provide easy access to state-of-the-art measurements and reconstructions of long-term environmental data, such as rainfall, temperature, plant and animal distributions, streamflow, and soils. Given a time period and a location, it will display the data graphically and will permit users to download the original high-resolution environmental data. By enabling scholars to easily discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environmental stability and change over centuries or millennia, SKOPE will empower reproducible research on the effects of climatic variation on human societies and the substantial impacts of humans on ancient and modern environments. It will also facilitate ongoing improvement of paleoenvironmental reconstructions. SKOPE will transform vast amounts of prior data collection, modeling, and research into usable environmental knowledge, enhancing the infrastructure of scientific research in such diverse disciplines as agronomy, anthropology, archaeology, ecology, economics, geography, political science, sociology, and sustainability. SKOPE will also make available publicly funded paleoenvironmental data and models to users in industry and government. For example, planners will be able to use SKOPE?s long-term environmental reconstructions to investigate vulnerabilities in infrastructure not revealed by historical experience (for example, streamflow or rainfall regimes outside the ranges of those documented historically). Students will have free access to high-quality environmental scenarios in which to situate their studies. Members of the general public will be able to see how ancient environments differed from those of today. Expanding the community able to obtain and use paleoenvironmental information will increase public scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology.Recent research has demonstrated that investigations of contemporary societal problems can benefit from the use of long-term environmental data and from comparisons with cases in which the interactions of human societies with their environments is well-documented over centuries. By providing easy access to time- and place-specific long-term environmental data, this project seeks to facilitate those efforts. SKOPE addresses two critical challenges to contemporary science: increasing access to publicly funded research; and ensuring that scientific results are transparent and reproducible. SKOPE will enable users to easily discover, download, visualize, and explore many sources of paleoenvironmental data that resulted from publicly funded research that are now difficult (at best) to find and use. SKOPE will also provide robust support for reproducible scientific research. Datasets provided by SKOPE will be accompanied by a systematic, comprehensible record of their origin and computational derivation, giving researchers an unprecedented ability to understand how the data were obtained.